Cresting the rise I almost dropped a load. Coming towards me was a huge horsebox, so wide it was tearing off the hedgerow on each side of the country road. I was airborne at about 60mph; even if I wanted to I couldn't stop. Moments passed, suddenly both wheels hit the deck and I grabbed everything there was to grab. All I could do was twitch the bars, use the hedge to lose even more speed.
The GPZ has a pretty comprehensive fairing. After the front wheel carved a path through the dense foliage, the GRP took the brunt of the force. A few branches tried to whiplash my helmet but I got my head down. The bars were doing an almighty twitch in my hands as the front wheel dug into the soft earth on the other side of the hedge. I ended up wedged in the middle of the bush, the foliage trying to close up around us.
I felt the horsebox sweep past, not bothering to stop. I could see the cows in the field trotting over to have a look at the curious thing that had suddenly come into their midst. I gingerly levered myself off the Kawasaki, forced my way backwards. The GPZ remained upright, as reluctant to fall over as it was to come out of the hedge.
It was a hell of a way to start life with a new motorcycle. I thought I'd just got the bargain of the year. A 1986 model for £1275. I'd been having immense fun hustling the 450lb machine down a bit of country road I thought I knew like the back of my hand. Now, look at me, screaming abuse and wrecking my back trying to pull the bugger out. I just knew its immaculate finish would be ruined. A lesser man would've burst into tears! It gave an inch, then shot out of the hedge so fast I fell over backwards and the machine went sideways. Took out an indicator and brake lever. Now I knew exactly what a bike looked like when it'd been dragged through a hedge backwards.
Riding home at a much reduced pace, in line with my shaking form and blitzed brain, the GPZ didn't really feel too happy. The engine shared enough of its ancestor's design to have the same paucity of midrange as the GPz550. The extra capacity had gone to produce even more power, the watercooling ensuring that the reliability gained for the air cooled fours would not be easily lost. If the engine would run down to low revs in top gear, it'd required slicing down the box two or three ratios before it'd produce acceleration in line with its flash style and cubic capacity.
The chassis was similarly better at the high end of the speed range, at the low rate of knots I was doing the front wheel felt imprecise. If the steering was easy the stability was quirky, tending to follow the contour of bumps and whitelines with a fidelity that was more reminiscent of a lightweight 250 than a middleweight four. My shaking hands were amplified by the bars into a disturbing twitch that in my state of mind convinced me that the front wheel was about to fall off or at the very least was dented.
Once home I hid the bike away in the garage, not wanting to admit to the wife that I'd had an accident within an hour of buying the machine. The next day, when I'd recovered, the bike rode much steadier and I began to think that 16 inch wheels were, after all, a bit of alright. I soon changed my mind when coming home I almost slid off when the rain started hitting the streets. The front tyre was an almost worn out Metz with suicidal tendencies every time I banked over.
I didn't like the feedback from the tyres in the rain at all. A set of Michelin radials (120/80x16 & 160/80x16) all but totally transformed the feel of the bike in the wet and took away a lot of the twitchiness in the dry. The only time it really threatened to let loose was when a large bump was hit at over 80mph. Then the bars would try to tear my wrists off the end of my arms. It soon died down but was violent enough to stain underpants.
Once I'd become used to the bike, a whole group of us, on 600 fours, went for a Continental blast. This consisted of mostly German autobahns where we played silly buggers, cruising at 100 to120mph for hours on end. Really crazy to be able to behave like total lunatics without fear of licence confiscation. Autobahn surfaces were very smooth, the GPZ not even showing signs of the mildest of weaves. I had great fun playing with the throttle for brief bursts of top speed testing - 145mph was the most I extracted. Fuel hovered around 30mpg, although UK riding turned in a much more reasonable 50mpg.
Apart from some high frequency vibration, the engine was not worried by the frenzied riding; if anything the harder it was revved the better it felt. The chassis was not quite so invincible, with a couple of bolts rattling loose and the brakes became so hot I'm sure they'd glow deep red in the dark; the headlamp wasn't up to more than 70mph so I never got the chance to find out.
Those high frequency vibes would get to my hands after about four hours. That was tolerable but not when the buzzing also took out the CDI unit 50 miles outside Berlin. My mates took turns towing me, not something that I'd want to repeat. We were all out of our minds when we got to Berlin, which was our excuse for getting drunk out of our heads and gorging ourselves on the nightlife. A mate in the UK was telephoned and dispatched to a breaker to buy a replacement, only took a day to get to us. CDI units are a bit notorious for blowing, the best solution is to carry a spare one at all times!
One thing had I noticed, that though the bike could be swung into single bends with aplomb, taking a series of S-bends was much harder work and the only alternative to slowing down was wasting most of the one's life working out to gain extra muscle. I could only think that the suspension was becoming coil-bound, producing a change in geometry that turned a light steering bike into a heavy old wheelbarrow. Or, perhaps, I just haven't developed the correct technique.
I always used to come out of the last bend in second gear, with the revs touching 10,000 and the front wheel pawing the air. By then my friends had disappeared down the road and I had to pump my way through the excellent gearbox with the throttle held wide open. Clutchless changes made only a minor amount of lurching in the transmission and hardly any crunching noises.
It may have been this abuse that led to a noisy clutch with 38000 miles on the clock. I tore the engine case off to find that the plate flanges were burred and everything felt very loose. The clutches aren't really up to continuous full power abuse and are quite rare in breakers. It took me about twenty calls to track one down. Whilst I was down amongst the engine I'd found one of the water hoses was leaking, the coolant a murky colour. Probably hadn't been changes from new, so I stopped the leak and put in some new fluid.
It didn't help with the starting, which had always been a tentative business with much juggling of the choke lever to help the engine catch as it churned over on the starter. I found a new set of spark plugs every 5000 miles helped a lot. Once or twice, on really cold winter days I had to resort to a bump start.
Winter blitzed the finish, corroded the calipers and showed all the plastic up as giving sod all protection. I'd have been better off on a naked bike. The exhaust was showing signs of going wafer thin in places as 43000 miles were clocked up. Blown baffles made slight hesitations in the carburation the norm rather than the exception, the bike being a real bugger until warmed up. As most of my commuting was in town I found myself changing the oil every 500 miles to stop it going murky white.
The front forks joined in with the jerkiness when the anti-dive decided to misbehave, but it was much easier to remove it than it was to get the wheels all polished up and looking nice again. Just about every fastener had come out in a rash of rust and by the time the first glimmer of spring came the silencers were dragging along the ground. Luckily, the breaker came up with decent replacements; the rest dealt with by elbow grease and Solvol.
I wasn't that impressed by the way it was falling apart before my eyes with less than 50,000 miles clocked up. A mate was selling his CBR600 and I wanted it something rotten. I sold the GPZ for what I paid for it originally so it was a pretty good deal.
John Cullasy
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In theory I had no chance against my mates on CBR, ZZR and FZR 600's. I was down on top speed by at least 10mph, acceleration wasn't anywhere near as mind blurring and handling was way inferior. But where there's a will there's a way. Effectively, this meant riding like a lunatic, stringing the watercooled, four cylinder mill along at maximum revs.
Neither the clutch nor the gearbox were too happy about my throttle to the stop changes, though the latter always crunched home. Just as well, as a missed change would've had the revs soaring to 15 thou and the engine internals exploding. An example of what I got away with - on one Continental outing, I slip-streamed the CBR600 and with the aid of a following gale and downhill stretch put 150mph on the (somewhat optimistic) clock. The secondary vibes had the bars trying to leap out of my hands and the tank thrumming away like some vile old piledriver of a British twin.
When we pulled in for some fuel, shuffling around like bent old men with eyes out on stalks and hands shaking like amphetamine addicts (is that why they call it speed?), the normally civilised and reliable GPZ mill stopped with an ominous clang, the temperature gauge going off the dial! My mates laughed at the vision of me pushing the thing the 1500 miles home, reassured that spending twice the money on their steeds was, indeed, money well spent. They were disappointed when she started up after fifteen minutes of cooling and prayers.
This kind of madness went on for nearly 20,000 miles. With 36k on the clock, there was a symphony of ringing noises, diagnosed as everything from shot main bearings to a disintegrating camchain tensioner; various dealers trying to get the bike cheap so they could bodge it and sell on at a large profit. I hoped it was just the clutch which was slipping at high revs and making the thing impossible to run below 3000rpm.
On examination, the drum's bearing was shagged, the plates warped and there was a lot of slop in the clutch mechanism. I annoyed a couple of breakers until one handed over a complete drum and mechanism for £30. I'd been quoted £125, so hanging out for the good deal obviously pays.
Unfortunately, the engine still clattered and rung away like there was no tomorrow. Yep, it was the good old camchain and tensioner duet...no point buying old or pattern stuff, so I handed over £200 to the local Kawasaki dealer for parts and labour.
The motor rustled rather than rattled, the rate at which the tacho spun around the dial well wicked. Only problem was when I changed the oil 2000 miles later, there was half a link sitting in the sump plug! I went back to the dealer, ranted and raved in front of some well off customers. The mechanic reckoned part of the old one must've come off before he got his hands on it! That sent me ballistic, the dealer only got rid of me by crossing my palm with five tenners. It pays to make a lot of noise!
The engine didn't appear to suffer any trauma, regularly being caned along at 140mph. Cut and thrust riding at this speed brought in some brake fade from the triple discs, which ended up hot enough to fry eggs and used to have steam pouring off them in the wet. On Metz tyres it felt really secure in the wet, encouraging me to keep the pace up, though when the front tyre went down to 3mm it became very twitchy. It was never less than fast turning, which kept the more modern replicas worried.
It was, however, in the wet that I first came off. Wet? It was blizzard conditions, a veritable snowstorm with the odd patch of black ice obscured by the terrible conditions. That's my excuse, anyway, and I'm sticking to it. I'm riding along at a moderate 50mph on the motorway, when the front end threw a massive wobbly. Instinctively, I grappled with the bars but was too slow, the front wheel seemed to dig in and off I went.
Luckily, I was in the slow lane at the time and my somersault happened on the hard shoulder. I caught a few glimpses of the Kawa tearing into the tarmac, but it wasn't until I came to a painful halt that I realised it'd had bumped into a couple of cages which in turn had spun on the ice-rink like surface, causing a mini pile-up. Only the lightness of the traffic stopped it turning into front page news.
I was winded and bruised, my leathers ripped and torn (which was better than having my flesh go the same way), whilst the Kawa had left a trail of broken plastic, scarred metal and shattered indicators. Out of nowhere, cop cars and ambulances turned up, I was frogmarched into the latter until I told them there was no way I was going to pay for being rescued. I was turfed out pronto, my space taken by a couple of shocked, crying cagers. Seemed like a good day's work to me.
I rode around on the Kawasaki without its plastic for a while, but it wasn't an attractive device naked and battered, worth sod all. Again, breakers were visited, front end traumas common enough to have a large supply of broken, scarred plastic. I found something I could repair for fifty quid plus newish bars, silencers and indicators for £45. A DIY spray job in green came out okay save that the shade made people stick fingers down their throat and go into various convolutions every time I parked up in town. No taste, some people!
With about sixty thou on the clock performance did a runner. I traced this to the carbs, which was a relief as I thought the engine might be worn out. They were full of a horrible brown gunge, probably from the unleaded petrol. Whatever it was it'd be ideal as a coating for space craft as nothing I tried shifted it. Eighty quid acquired a newish set of carbs which could actually be balanced properly.
Less vibration, the former zap reinstated and fuel improved from 35 to 50mpg, so they paid for themselves. Only hassle was that I almost destroyed the airfilter box fitting them. Also, they needed a balance every 800 miles. Rather an intrusion as I left the valves for 10,000 miles at a time without anything going down. I put on a new O-ring chain and sprocket set every 15000 miles (if I ignored the sprockets the chain would die in less than 5000 miles). Tyres were needed every 6000 to 7000 miles. It added up to the same kind of running costs as the more modern replicas - ie, it was better not to think about it too much, just enjoy!
In two years I ran the motor up to 80,000 miles. Towards the end of my tenure, I kept falling off! Silly stuff, coming off in town on dodgy surfaces and whacking into cars which suddenly went berserk in heavy traffic. My paint job and a lot of the plastic was heavily bruised. What really threw me, though, was heavy chattering from the front end and an excess of clunking when I braked heavily...the alloy wheel was cracking up around the hub! I knew I shouldn't have run straight across a roundabout!
Front wheels are somewhat rare. One happy breaker/bodger offered to wave his magic wand at the wheel but I don't think he was up to the art of alloy welding. Fill with plastic metal, paint and off-load on the local dealer had its appeal (he had a mint CBR600 on offer at 3k). As the forks were shot as well, I succumbed to his offer of a complete front for £150 off a GPZ900, which he'd fit for free.
What I didn't realise was that this would result in a subtle change in steering geometry. Subtle in so far as it looked the same to me but not in the least obscure about the way the front wheel wanted to tuck in on corners. At least the wheel wasn't likely to explode into a million of pieces.
I'd had enough, anyway, and got £1600 against the CBR, which I thought was pretty good. The dealer shifted the GPZ for £2250 but only after clocking it back to 19 thou and doing a quick respray. Alas, I soon realised he'd done a similar trick to my CBR, it wasn't anywhere near as fast as my mate's, wasn't much better than the GPZ. Still, I sold it for £2800 and bought a ZXR-7 for £3300. I was finally ahead of the game.
D.L.
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There's an art to buying a bike for the minimum of dosh and making it last as long as possible without spending out any serious money. One element is to buy a bike that's past its prime, no longer considered to be on the pace. There's no point trying to hustle a deal on a bike that everyone wants to buy. On the other hand, there's not much point buying something that's so out of the game that plonkers in cages can take you out on the open road.
A 27000 mile GPZ600 at £1250 seemed like a good deal. It would soon need a new set of consumables but the motor was happy to rev into the red without any noise or vibration. Handling was as twitchy as an overloaded shopping trolley at the front but I could live with it. Didn't know any better, really.
The first ride, I pulled a stonking wheelie that nearly looped the loop. Did it in the centre of Leeds, which had the pointy headed ones going all rash on their radios. With both wheels back on terra firma I gave a cop a cheery wave. Knew I'd made his day by the expression on his face. Two miles later I had a blast of reality, haw-haw-haw went the plod mobile. I looked behind to see some Metro horror all done out in police colours. Thought, you gotta be kidding mate, you couldn't catch me on a 125 in that pile of shite.
Throttle madness followed. Oh, it was fun to think about their angst as they ate my exhaust. We live in a democracy, after all, and I wasn't doing no harm. I saw them in the mirrors a few times as I hammered the Kawasaki through the countryside, but they hadn't a hope.
As soon as they were out of sight I swung off the main road, heading down some narrow back lanes that I'd spent my youth exploring. No way, short of a couple of helicopters, that they could find me. Once upon a time, the GPZ was state of the art, could still be lumbered through the tight curves, just as long as the twitches from the front wheel were ignored. I made good time down the country to Nottingham.
That evening I went to turn the lights on, only to find that the front was down to the pilot. No hassle, I thought, I was only going across town. Halfway through the journey a cop stuck his head out of his jam-sandwich, screamed something about bloody lights. I swerved round him, gave him the finger and the throttle some stick. Blind fool. My escape velocity would've meant instant licence confiscation but I didn't stop.
Oh, forgot to mention, the bike didn't have MOT, tax disc or insurance. There was no way I was going to pull over for the law. It was do or die. Urban warfare. Later, I did go to the extreme expense of fitting a new front light bulb but the bugger had a tendency to blow every week. Might've had something to do with the way I took the bike into the red through each and every gear. The resulting secondary vibes were out of all proportion to its engine capacity.
A week or two later, one of the exhaust cans started dragging along the tarmac. I caught it before it fell off. A crack almost all the way around its circumference. All the excuse I needed to get a six-pack. After drowning my sorrows I cut up a couple of cans into sheet metal and then used jubilee-clips to secure them around the can. Amazingly, the repair was sturdy and stopped any gases escaping. Two months later the other can went the same way and was similarly repaired. Painting the whole thing in heat resistant matt black paint made it look less ratty. Not that I cared.
The next little problem was with the front calipers. All gummed up, reluctant to work and dead easy to go head over heels when they snagged on in the wet. A bloody disgrace, if you ask me. It's amazing what these Jap engineers can get away with. With a nice bit of hammer work they sprung apart to reveal shot seals and dead pads. Oh well, I always did like getting covered in dog shit in breakers.
In between these minor problems, the GPZ shot around at highly illegal velocities, pissing off any number of expensively mounted CBR and FZR riders when I whiplashed the wee beastie into gaps they left in the corners. I hadn't yet replaced the tyres, the near slicks squirming around vividly, the whole bike shuddering but it'd pull through if you ignored it all and kept her on line with a little bit of muscle.
Most of the time, anyway. There were a couple of times when the Kawa went completely out of control. Everything hanging around that devilish front wheel. One time I was thrown right off and the bike exploded its plastic all along the tarmac. I righted myself, shaking from the suddenness of the impact but soon found that I was largely unscathed. Just the usual scratches and bruises.
The Kawasaki was as deeply damaged as you could get without actually bending any of the major components. It was out with the GRP kit, filler and matt black paint. The rolling wreck that resulted was a magnet to the police - one swine was seen trying to wipe off a couple of months accumulated crud on the numberplate. A brick through a bank's window caused a sufficient diversion to have him running around like a jerk whilst I sneaked off on the Kawasaki. Many such near escapes kept me on my toes.
After about six months I was riding around at high speed on what essentially was a rolling wreck. It was amazing, really, how rapidly a bit of Japanese engineering could go off, aided along by massive neglect and the odd crash. Top speed was still around the 140mph mark, but now it was accompanied by heavy wobbles, wild vibration and dangerous braking. It was kind of fun. It was getting away with murder against all the odds.
At times it was very irritating. Like when one of the carbs started leaking fuel and I ignored it until a small fireball tried to set my thigh alight. Or when the engine cut out because I hadn't repaired the front guard, which split and cracked provided little protection in the wet. Or when the chain broke, taking out its guard and half the back of the crankcase (that Plastic Metal is wonderful). And many more minor incidents that added up to a catalogue of disasters save that they were far enough apart not to create total annoyance.
The engine needed regular maintenance but didn't get it. If it still ran it was left well enough alone. The only real intrusion was the gearbox clanging away when the oil turned to sludge - every 3000 miles or so. Carbs went in and out of balance to a whim all of their own. Valves were never checked as the engine was always willing to rev into the red.
Most of my friends expected the end to come from an exploding engine. It sort of enlivened their day, the idea that a cheapskate was going to get his comeuppance. Serve him right for not signing up for six grand's worth of HP. How I laughed as time went by. Sure, the bike was 20mph down on the top end compared to the hot 600's but for most of the time it was right in there with the pack. Interesting times, indeed.
Until the speed wobbles came in with a vengeance. Nothing seemed any more loose than previously. 53000 miles of much abuse and neglect had resulted in the rear wheel cracking up. Or it may've been the times we'd slewed loudly into the pedestrian precinct, thumping over the obstacle course. No problem finding a replacement wheel as they are shared with a number of other models and GPZ600's, themselves, are usually written off at the front end.
I did clean it up a little, enough to get an offer off a neighbour which left me with three hundred quid in profit. Nice going. Its replacement was an early £2000 GSXR750 Streetfighter. A bloody wicked monster for which the relatively tame GPZ proved to be good training.
Tony Northcote