Soooo…after sitting totally disassembled for a year, I’ve awakened Bultakenstein from its slumber.
When we last left off, I had taken everything apart to work on frame modifications on the seat/tail and rear engine mounts. However, after so much time I needed to refresh my memory about what was going on where, so I pulled all the major components off the shelves and refit the major pieces together yesterday morning.
I installed my new non-leading-axle forks for the first time, and pleasantly discovered that, yes, I had actually read the Suzuki parts diagrams correctly. I’d already purchased the one item (an axle spacer) needed to swap out the GS650L forks for GS750ES forks. They replaced the cruiser forks perfectly and will give me a more reasonable trail number. They have those crappy anti-dive valves on them, which I will just blank off.
As a bonus, the forks came with fittings for a telefix fork brace already installed. The center plate is missing, but I can easily make one up out of alloy plate pretty easily – it’s just a flat square with four holes in the corners. I thought I would probably have to pitch the Honda Nighthawk fender I’d planned to use, since it was set up to fit leading link forks. Fortunately, after sizing it up, I think it can still work. It can still easily mounted to be concentric to the curve of the wheel, but it now sits a bit too far forward. I think I might trim back the front a few inches to make it look more balanced and less massive.
I’ve been mentally visualizing various rear engine mount designs for a while now, but without actually studying the relationships right there in front of you, it’s not very productive. Whatever I come up with can’t interfere with the chain path, so I laid a long piece of all-thread on top of the sprockets as a stand-in for my chain. As you can see, there’s no straightforward, direct means of bridging the upper rear mounting boss to the frame.
The Suzuki GT750 rubber engine mounts are sitting on the engine.
On my lunch break today, I did a couple of napkin sketches (literally on restaurant napkins). I started out imagining some sort of bolt-in subframe that would have the rubber mounts between it and the main frame, á la Norton Commandos, but that arrangement would either require additional frame members or put the rubber dampers right where the chain goes. So I changed my thinking to integrate the rubber mounts into the subframe itself. Here’s my most promising concept below. It could be made from alloy plates and two cross tubes made from 1.25″ x 0.120″ wall DOM (which the Suzuki dampers would fit in perfectly. The plates would attach to the frame against the inside of the side plates, and the swingarm pivot bolt would pass through it.
