Sorting out a cheapie bike

Colleague won an Ebay auction for a non-running ("but did before it was
laid up") Suzuki GN125. P reg, £165, otherwise not bad. I told him to
stick a new battery and some fresh petrol in it and try his luck. He
flattened the battery trying to start it, so I said I'd pop over and
have a look today, if he recharged the battery.

After I'd diagnosed that fuel was leaving the tap, but not coming out of
the float bowl drain plug, I switched it to reserve......

.......and fuel flowed. And it started, and blimey, sounded sweet.
Really, really nice.

Paint in good order, exhaust rusty but not blowing, needs a new chain
and a pair of tyres and a set of front disc pads plus a damn good clean.
We changed the brake fluid, and checked that the caliper wasn't seized.

Nice little learner bike for, I suppose, something like £275 by the time
it's ready for the MoT.

Cheap bikes - they're still out there.

 

I wish I had one. Or two. Or seven cheap ones....

Good luck to him. Or should that be "well done chap on getting almost as
good a bargaind as Mungo"?

And just out of curiosity...

How does this:

Get to this:

?

Surely if it just needed to go onto reserve then no fuel would flow prior to
switching to reserve? Or is it one of those bloody stupid vacuum type jobs
where reserve works under gravity but the rest of the system needs to be
primed and sorted etc etc etc? And if it *is* that sort of thing how do you
go about circumventing it and ust using good old Newton's Law(s)...?

Just curious as I'm bound to have some sort of similar problem eventually
with the 'fleet'...

Dave

 

IIRC many bikes have a gauze filter on main, but not on reserve. If the
filter was clagged...

 

Because I pulled the pipe off the fuel tap, and switched it rapidly
between main and reserve. Sorry, should have been more specific.

 

On Sun, 12 Nov 2006 21:49:29 GMT, "platypus"

snip>

I've found problems with the reserve part of the tap more often than
the main because that's the part of the tap that has the crud dragged
through from the bottom of the tank.

I've used a hacksaw on the pipe that sticks up into the tank and
reduced the reserve to about 0.5l to increase the tank range after I
had continuous problems with the bike when it was run on reserve and
I'm pretty sure we had to do similar with one of the team ukrm taps
the first year we were racing.

 

You're not kidding but you do need a bit of luck.

I picked up a one owner 2001 GS500 with low mileage for £601. It was on eBay
and didn't make the reserve. The guy contacted me and said I could have it.
It's a minter. When I got it back and started going through the receipts he
had spent nearly a grand on it over the past year. Including New: Tyres,
Chain and Sprockets, full service, Battery, clutch cable, brake pads, discs
and rear calliper, wheel bearings, down pipes and new header bolts, head
bearings, heated grips.

 

Molly wrote

A bargain but not unexpected cos folks don't want them cos they are
utter crap only a total muppet would ever own one.

My point exactly.


Just as an aside, how do you rate the longer forks, is there any
improvement worth lusting over?

 

I would have to disagree with those folks. I think it's a fun bike. How many
other bikes out there can you ride at full throttle almost everywhere.

This one certainly handles better with a more compliant ride than my old
1995 one. However, I didn't know it had longer forks.

 

Molly wrote

Indeed it is, which is why I have two.

2000 I think it was they changed them.

 

Another piece of knowledge accumulated. Now where did I put that brain cell.