So last time I was lurching from stall to stall in the rebuild process, but I neglected to mention one additional thing which had happened during this time – I found a potential track bike, once again in Victoria (the same place I sourced the engine from for the rebuild).
Having another FZR600 as a track bike made a whole lot of sense, given the amount of spare parts I was already accumulating from the restoration project, my knowledge of how they hang together and the fact that they were pretty much designed to be track bikes back in the day.
Unregistered, unroadworthy, a ’92 but with a miles/kms speedo, twin headlights (whereas in Australia the ’92 model had morphed to a single headlight), and in desperate need of some love. The upsides – low kms on the engine, and a cost that matched the condition of the bike. The history of the thing would be fascinating to know – either it is an Australian model which has been modified, or it is a US model imported here for some reason.
Picking up the bike was an adventure in itself, but loosely speaking it involved a spare Sunday in Melbourne, a nearly 200km round trip, a hire car, a work colleague to ride shotgun, another former work colleague now living near Melbourne with a temporary storage shed, and finding someone to haul the thing for me. Massive thanks to shotgun Julie, sheddy Alice and Mark from MRT Motorcycle Transport for turning what was a logistical nightmare into a reality. Within a week the bike was back at my place and I was ready to start stripping bits off that would never need to go back on again (lights, mirrors, indicators etc) and just generally getting a sense of what would be needed to get it ready for a track day.
Even though the engine sounded really smooth, it was clear that a multitude of sins had been performed on the poor thing. I’ll save that for another post when I start to look seriously at the horrors that aren’t evident from the picture above.
At least it didn’t look like I’d need to do another bloody engine rebuild, and to be honest when I listened to the motor I half contemplated just swapping this one straight in to the restoration project… but I didn’t.
One of the most unexpected bonuses from the bike however was a notoriously unavailable part that I needed for the restoration – an indicator surround only used on some versions of these bikes.
I’m not being melodramatic when I say that these things are pretty much impossible to find. I’ve hunted high and low to find one, and every OEM part site that lists them shows them as out of stock. I did find one which at least had a price listed for them, which was nearly AUD80, for one stupid little bit of plastic (but it also showed as no longer being available). But without them, the fairings on the restoration bike would have big gaps that I’d need to fix somehow.
The new junker bike had two of them – one in excellent condition, one slightly damaged – but if nothing else it was a template to either 3D print copies of, or to use to create a resin casting mould to make more of them. This little piece of plastic was almost worth the price of the bike alone, since it was an unsolved blocker on the restoration project, something that I couldn’t solve by forking out cash for OEM parts from overseas as tends to be the case with most other FZR parts.
I had solved one problem, bought myself some cheap insurance in the form of spare parts for the restoration project, and if all went well then also got myself a track bike to play with. And with that, back to waiting I went.
Next up: The wait continues