POST NO.1

Friday, 29 March 2013

POST NO.1

My friend Evan dropped this GPZ out to the workshop last week. He picked it up a few months ago in Cork as a non-runner. He did some work to it and got it running again but it didn’t run very well so he asked me to take a look at the electrics.

Mercenary Garage - Kawasaki GPZ1100 Square Eyed Git

So the wiring loom is a complete mess. It still has the bulk of the original wiring but it’s been hacked and bodged and is a bit melty in places! The loom has a single fuse and dozens of scotch-locks and all the redundant wiring (idiot lights, right-hand switch gear and most of the stuff going to the headlights) is rolled into a ball and abandoned to its fate.

I surgically removed all the dodgy wiring and in the end, all that was left were the electrical components – no wiring left at all! I’ve fitted a proper fuse box and begun wiring it all back up again. I hope to get it finished over the Easter weekend.

When I saw the bike, I thought it looked familiar – I had an idea that I’d seen it in a magazine back in the 90’s. So the other night I was in the workshop looking at the GPZ and wondering about this. I had an Idea it was probably in Streetfighters Magazine but which one?

I’ve hundreds of magazines in the workshop and to go through all of them would take hours. But I didn’t feel much like doing any real work so I started at the beginning and after only a couple of minutes I found it – Streetfighters Issue 12 April/May 1994.

Streetfighters Issue 12 April/May 1994

The bike has changed somewhat over the last 19 years. The bodywork is undoubtedly the same but the tasty GSXR 1100 upside-down front end has been replaced with a less tasty front end off a Honda. Likewise, the ZXR 750 rear wheel and swingarm.

According to the Streetfighters article, the bike had some kind of flatslide carbs – these are now gone too, replaced with CV carbs off God-knows-what. I suspect that these carbs are going to cause problems later - not least because there are no vacuum take-offs on the carbs or on the inlet rubbers so there’s no way to hook up a carb balancer.

CV Carbs - Hopefully actually off a GPZ 1100

The original 4:1 V&H pipe has been replaced by what looks like a very unusual 4:2 Harris. Mercifully, the two square headlights in their aluminium bezel are also gone.