Here's my intro post:
Yesterday (05/05/24) I purchased a 1997 LS650 with 15K here in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is pretty much OEM. When I went over to look at it I was told "I started it a couple of days ago and now gas is leaking out of the airbox . . .". I took a Kant-Twist clamp with me and put that on the line to the carb, and hopefully when I go back to pick it up this week I won't find a huge puddle of gas under it. From my reading in the forum it sounds like this may be the dreaded petcock failure, so I ordered an OEM Raptor part last night.
I raced MX, trials and roadrace for 46 years before retiring from competition about 7-8 years ago. I've owned/raced 250/350 Ducatil, 500 Matchless G80CS, BSA B50MX unit single, TT500 Yamaha, a one-off ride on a friend's DOHC Norton Garden Gate Manx, and also various Ducati and Laverda twins, Suzuki/Yamaha/Kawasaki 2T singles and twins, small Honda 4T twins, Greeves, CZ, Maico, Bultaco and others that I've probably forgotten. Unfortunately I got hooked on building things so with that added to the racing I never got much seat time in a year.
I've had a Honda CTX700 DCT (being converted to a UJM/standard) and a Kawasaki 400 Ninja (the unmolested street bike that is always in running condition) these past 4+ years. A week ago I made the mistake of looking at everything on Craigs List starting at the low $ end, curious what there might be that would make a good donor bike for some kind of project. I saw various Suzuki 650s and with a bit of research decided they sounded interesting. My big British singles had pretty good sized flywheels, as did my Bultaco 350 trials bike, so that aspect of the Suzuki has some appeal. I'm only riding on the street now, and that infrequently, and I'm usually on back roads away from traffic and just puttering along at 1/2 throttle on my 400. So making something out of the Suzuki sounds like it might be a good fit.
However, even though I remember when Easy Rider came out, I've never been attracted to choppers. A brief ride on a pre-unit Triumph 500 twin in a mildly chopped sprung-hub frame made it clear I was having more fun on a dirt bike.
So even though my new bike is reasonably clean/stock, there are a LOT of parts that are going to get replaced.
When I downsized all the vintage bikes/race bikes I vowed that I'd had enough of wire spoke wheels, drum brakes, tires with inner tubes and damper-rod telescopic forks, all of which are on the Savage. I would have been happy to have bought an engine, frame and clear title but instead I've got an entire motorcycle with many parts that seem too nice to scrap so I'll probably first see if I can find someone who can make use of them (as they come off the bike).
I'm back to about page 70 in "Rubber Side Down" and I'm enjoying the technical discussion. I've designed and built several race chassis and accumulated a good assortment of machine tools/fabrication equipment. I started a mailing list for motorcycle chassis design topics almost 30 years ago and there are a few people from it that are also here (Armen and Srinath that I know of for sure). I hope I'll be able to contribute some help, but there's a lot about the Savage that has already been figured out and I'll probably find more of that information as I push on past page 70 in "RSD".
Here are links to a couple of photos of my former race bikes that are up on my website (which has north of a gigabyte of images of mostly racers, interesting classic/modern bikes, tools, etc).
Oops, I was just informed I need to make a first post before I can include links, so I'll do them after this post.
Like Bnbsavage who posted just above, parts are going to get cut off.
cheers,
Michael
San Francisco CA
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