A few years ago, when I was looking for another ‘interesting’ bike to add to my collection, I discovered one for sale at Motorcycles Unlimited, a London dealer. Not only was it a rare model anyway, but it was apparently one of only two ever officially imported into the UK for the Earls Court Motor Show, and also believed to have been given to works rider Graham Beamish by Suzuki GB in recognition of his invaluable services to the company.
I already had a road-test of this model, published in a 1969 issue of ‘Cycle World’ magazine, and I knew the bike would be a good investment, especially as it came with a lot of spare parts (shown in photo) and such an interesting provenance. However, the dealer selling it was renowned for their very high prices and this bike was no exception.
In the past, I had already bought and restored a succession of two-stroke singles (see elsewhere on my website), all of which had then been sold almost straight away, as they actually weren’t really suitable for my needs. Thankfully, by now I had finally realised that there was no point buying yet another one, so I looked elsewhere for something more practical, eventually ending up with my (arguably, far better!) Suzuki T500 instead.
However, moving forward to Spring 2016, I was browsing Ebay when I came across a similar model TS250 for sale, also advertised here in ‘Motor Cycle News’ at that time.
Although advertised as a 1969 model, it appeared to be the later 1970 version, with the ‘Suzuki’ name written across the tank. It was claimed to be ‘original’ and it was the first example that I had seen since the dealer’s model, several years earlier. Despite my ‘sensible’ decision, I’d often regretted not buying that one, so I was determined to not let this one slip away. I contacted the private seller and we negotiated a deal over the phone, as he lived about 200 miles away from me. He had only had the bike a year or so, and after doing ‘a few things to it’, he’d ridden it around on private land.
It was only when we were concluding the deal and I asked for the registration that the penny dropped! This was not just ‘similar’ to the first bike – it was the SAME bike – APY179G! As such, it even still had its distinctive ‘Tank pumped out’ sticker on the front mudguard, a souvenir from the 1972 Isle Of Man TT races (tanks used to be drained before motorcycles were allowed to be transported to the island on the ferry).
Trying to establish exactly what had happened in the interim period didn’t prove easy, though. The seller hadn’t bought the bike from the London dealer that I’d seen previously, but from a private seller; the latter had had the bike for eleven years, so it looked like the dealer may have been selling it purely on commission? I tried to contact both the dealer and this previous owner, but sadly, neither party responded to my enquiries. All the spares offered in the original deal had also ‘gone missing’, somewhere along the line.
I had the bike couriered to me, and first impressions weren’t too bad; there were clearly a lot of rare, original components still fitted, including the sought-after grey control cables, and ‘S-for Suzuki’-marked bolts. Even more encouraging was that the bike literally started ‘first kick’, although running rather smokily – but hey, it was a two-stroke, after all!
Not wishing to unduly annoy my neighbours, I quickly went through the gears, ensuring the clutch engaged enough to lift the bike on the suspension, with the front brake on. Thankfully, all seemed fine, and I was relieved that I hadn’t bought a complete wreck, even if the provenance now did all sound a bit strange….
A few hours of easy ‘spannering’ soon saw the bike reduced to its component parts, and actually, not that many of them; I’d forgotten how simple these old bikes were!
The first priority was to get the tank repainted, as the current ‘lime green’ finish looked awful.
I had expected to simply sand it down (hoping there were no hidden areas of filler!), but the decals, and then the paint, simply peeled off in huge sheets; obviously not primed or bonded to the tank at all! However, there were two ‘plus points’; there was no filler, and the paint beneath was the beautiful OEM iridescent green, although sadly, just not quite in good enough condition to retain.
As usual, I took the tank to my friends at Wicked Coatings in Poole. Although primarily famous for their hydrographic process (where components are ‘dipped’, to get all types of exotic coatings), the company was also capable of superb paintwork, as I had already commissioned for my Electric Chopper and Suzuki T500. The company had the advantage of now seeing exactly what the original paint should look like, and they somehow reproduced it perfectly, laying a translucent green lacquer over a gold base-coat, and incorporating the two silver stripes. Now I just had to make the rest of the bike look this good!
I had already decided that (as a Heritage Conservation graduate myself) it was important to retain as much of the original bike as possible. Thankfully, other people were now also beginning to realise that patination was more interesting than ‘shiny newness’, so it was no longer necessary to replace everything that wasn’t perfect. Luckily, both chrome mudguards were in remarkably good condition, so they were just cleaned up and sprayed silver inside to keep any rust at bay.
The oil tank and air filter box were also in good shape, with just minimal weathering. The seat base was sound, and it had already been recovered, with the original cover supplied too.
The frame seemed straight and I could find no cracks, although the rear brake pedal was badly bent and had an unsightly bolt badly welded to it, simply to keep it functional.
Usually, I would have all these steel parts shot-blasted and powder-coated; a quick, cheap and efficient way to make everything look new again. This time, ‘new; would have looked inappropriate alongside so many ‘world-weary’ components, so I settled on a more subtle refurbishment, using an aerosol can.
The downside of this was that I had to clean all the accumulated grease and soil from the frame myself; a long and laborious task that I really hated doing, and I vowed that I would never do it again… (and not for the first time, either!)
Worse was yet to come, though. With the frame stripped, it was now obvious that the swinging-arm bearings were unacceptably worn, and that there was no way that the bike would pass its MoT (UK test of roadworthiness). At least it was easier to apply the heat and brutality needed to get the old bearings out with just the frame to deal with; I can’t imagine that this would have been possible working on a complete bike.
Finding replacement bearings was not easy or cheap, but I eventually found some in Italy, and thankfully, they went in OK.
I hadn’t planned to do any serious work on the engine, as my very brief test-run had not shown up anything drastically wrong. Nevertheless, it was clear that ‘someone’ (probably ‘lime green paint man’) had badly painted the head and barrel’s fins black, rather than leave them as bare alloy, as Mr Suzuki had originally intended.
By far the easiest solution was to remove both parts (relatively easy on a two- stroke!) and get them professionally aqua-blasted back to alloy, before reassembling them with new gaskets.
I chose to strip and clean the carb myself, using alloy-wheel cleaner, as I’d previously found that aqua-blasting got beads into every tiny orifice, proving to be more trouble than it was worth in the long run. Still a great process for other simpler parts though.
Normally, I buy my project bikes in the autumn to rebuild over the winter, but fate had offered me this one in the spring. This meant that just as I was getting into the build, the summer arrived and I was obliged to put everything to one side, to enjoy the lovely warm, sunny weather. I knew this was ‘dangerous territory’ as there was an unwritten rule that said that any project abandoned for longer than six months had a very slim chance of ever getting completed. Therefore, I became increasingly worried, as the months came and went, with no work getting done…(or indeed, me having no enthusiasm to do any…)
Eventually, I got a grip and resumed the build in January 2017, mainly due to the stress of seeing a rare and valuable bike potentially end its days as a pile of anonymous and worthless bits! At least most of the tedious and dirty preparation had already been completed, so now it was simply a case of putting things back together. Of course, by now, I had forgotten all of those little helpful clues as to where bits went, and in which order, so some parts had to be reassembled more than once!
The bike had not been on the road since 2012, and I became increasingly more dubious about the validity of that last MoT test, as I discovered quite a few odd faults. The rear brake shoes were far too small to even engage with the drum, the battery was twice as big as it should be, so it would not fit (and had been bodged into place), there was no speedo drive pinion at all, and the whole headlight assembly was a real mess. The kick-starter was also completely wrong, but I was able to source the correct part from the USA.
I was also able to buy new brake shoes (both F&R) easily enough, but had to source the tiny speedo pinion drive from Germany, using the Suzuki part number to find it listed under a completely different model bike. Even then, I had to fabricate the nylon bush from a plastic bolt, as I wasn’t prepared to spend £20 getting a tiny NOS part shipped from the USA.
Similarly, a new battery was only £10, but replacing the damaged battery box would have cost a fortune, so I repaired and fabricated what I needed instead – for nothing!
Even the mangled rear brake lever was saved and re-used, after an hour with an angle grinder and a blow-lamp, re-profiling the metal to the correct shape.
The headlight had already seen plenty of modification, before my time. The strange flat-bottomed (and now quite unobtainable) original sealed-beam unit had been cut open, and a random couple of bulb-holders previously soldered onto the back of the reflector (although now no longer attached). The reflector itself had lost virtually all of its silvering, perhaps worsened by the heat from the abortive soldering process, so I doubted if it had ever been up to MoT standards in 2012.
The original sealed-beam had only ever been a puny 25w / 25w unit, so it needed every bit of reflectance to put out any useful light. The now-priceless glass front was factory-crimped to the reflector, and it was only too predictable what would happen, should anyone be so foolish as to try and separate the two. Therefore, the silvering had to be redone via the butchered hole in the back of the reflector. This I did, using thin strips of aluminium ‘tinfoil’, stuck on with PrittStik adhesive.
It actually turned out better than I had expected, and hopefully it would convince my friendly MoT inspector when the time came.
Of course there were countless other things that needed fixing too. The handlebar dip switch was smashed (successfully rebuilt with epoxy), the wiring loom needed re-sleeving, patching and some new bullet connectors, the control cables had not been lubricated for a very long time (so were dry, tight and unresponsive), the front tyre went flat (not a puncture, but a faulty valve, which was much easier to fix), the rear tyre was very perished, so had to be replaced…and so the list went on.
The exhaust pipe was left until last. Previously, getting it off the bike had been a nightmare, as it had become totally bonded into the outlet manifold, and once again, it took every bit of my ingenuity and some sheer brutality to get the parts separated.
After prior experience with my T500, I suspected that the excessive smoke I’d seen on the test-run may have been due to old oil in the exhaust, so I was determined to get this out, before de-rusting and repainting the pipe. YouTube showed an effective way to do this, by setting fire to the oil, then super-charging the flames with an airline. However, I could not get away with doing this in my own backyard, and I feared the fire-brigade turning up if I tried doing it somewhere out of town.
With the bike now almost finished, and the pipe obviously needed, I was forced to take a different approach. Many others recommended using caustic soda (Sodium Hydroxide), a chemical that I use regularly to clean drains, but that I’d previously been unimpressed with, when using it against oil and soot. Nevertheless, it was worth a try. I discovered that a plastic end-cap from industrial scaffolding fitted almost perfectly onto the front of the pipe (aided with a heat-gun) and a hose-clamp sealed it totally. This meant I could stand the pipe up, fill it with the caustic solution, then get on with other jobs while the chemicals did their work.
Unfortunately, when I subsequently ran the bike for the first time, there was now a great deal of smoke unexpectedly emerging from around the engine. Further investigation revealed that this was partly due to a small pinhole that had previously rusted through the exhaust, close to the port. However, the majority of the leak was due to me not sealing the manifold to the cylinder when I rebuilt the top-end of the engine. (Now I knew why it had previously been so hard to get these parts apart!) After quickly detaching the silencer, I was able to TIG-weld the pinhole closed, luckily without blowing a much bigger hole in the thin metal! The manifold was sealed using proprietary exhaust gum, which worked perfectly. Now there was only the slightest leak, where the silencer was simply held into the port by a spring.
Another issue that immediately arose when initially restarting the bike was that it fired up on what seemed like half-throttle, revving furiously! The cause of this was remarkably hard to find, despite it seeming to be quite a simple matter. Time after time, I stripped the carb and throttle cable, but all appeared to be in order. Eventually I realised that the adjuster at the actual throttle had become unscrewed during refurbishment; once that was reset correctly, all was fine again.
Due to other commitments, the whole rebuild had got put to one side for several months, and it proved hard to get back into it again later. Surprisingly, the bike showed no desire to start this time, and also decided to pour petrol everywhere, out of the carb. Obviously the float or the needle was sticking, so this had to be fixed. Luckily, it was possible to simply loosen the two clamps, then rotate the carb to get access to the float chamber screws, after first removing the throttle cable and slide assembly. The needle jet was indeed stuck, but easily freed, and the flooding stopped. Nevertheless, the bike still refused to start – in fact it was so dead, it seemed like the ignition was turned off!
The quickest and easiest thing to check was the plug, but this looked OK and there was a good, fat spark. This meant that the fault must lie with the carb, so for the umpteenth time, off it came again! Puzzlingly, this all looked fine; after all, it had been completely stripped relatively recently. Much head-scratching ensued, until eventually, I checked the spark-plug one more time…and there was now no spark! I tried it with the only other plug I had to hand (which had already been replaced from another bike, so probably not a good choice!) and (perhaps not surprisingly) there was still no spark, so this led me to checking the points and wiring.
Fortunately, I was brought back to the right path with a jolt – quite literally! There may not have been a spark at the plug, but I discovered that there was plenty of HT voltage at the cap, as I got a massive shock while idly turning the engine over! Having established that both the carb AND electrics were OK, I had the idea to use yet another spark plug, this time from my T500 that I knew was fine. This was a short-reach plug rather than the proper long-reach; not ideal, but a lot better than the other way around! I guessed it was a similar temperature range and took a chance that it would be OK, at least for a short test.
Immediately, the bike burst into life on the very first kick – what a relief, especially as I had already planned to film it running for a YouTube video the very next day! However, the gods were clearly still conspiring against me, as at that very moment, the ignition key decided to break off, virtually flush with the switch – oh, fabulous. To be fair, the key (which had come with the bike) was a badly-chosen copy, much too long and already showing signs of failure as a result. Luckily, I was able to get the vital broken piece out of the switch, and my local locksmith made me a much more suitable replacement, although he did warn me that the blank he used wasn’t 100% correct.
Did the key work? Of course not; it was one of those days! This meant that I had to remove the whole switch, which meant removing the bike’s tank, etc, etc…. Back at the locksmiths, he was able to simply modify the key slightly (at no charge!) so that it worked perfectly. Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat yet again – woohoo!
The next day, I loaded up the bike and took it out to my usual photo-shoot location, a quiet road amidst the Dorset countryside. This time, everything went to plan and the bike started easily, although initially producing quite a bit of smoke. Thankfully this soon stopped though, and I was able to get some good video footage of the bike idling reliably, at remarkably low revs. With that done, my partner Linda worked her usual magic and got some great static shots of the bike in the spring sunshine, despite me having to continually move it out of the road, due to passing traffic!
Here’s a link to that video:
With the photos and video ‘in the bag’, I was then able to post details of the bike on a couple of FaceBook pages, and also list the bike for sale on Ebay UK. This produced a great response, with large numbers of people viewing and ‘watching’ the bike. In addition, I was contacted by ‘Simon’, the owner of the ‘other’ alleged UK-registered bike, which was very reassuring. In my advert, I had repeated this claim that there were ever only two, but I had no way of confirming this. We exchanged engine and frame number details, and everything about the tale now seemed to ring true.
Well, the Suzuki DID sell, but not to the idiot that won the Ebay auction with the only bid. Initially, all seemed fine with him, and he sent a friend (an ex-bike dealer) to collect the bike. This latter guy seemed impressed with the bike, but there was a quick phone call, then he said the buyer now ‘didn’t want the bike’ (as it wasn’t ‘mint’, even though it had never been advertised as such!) and he wouldn’t hand over the cash. Off he went, empty-handed and a bit embarrassed at being caught in the middle of this dispute; I simply reported the buyer to Ebay.
This charming person then left me damaging negative feedback (which of course I couldn’t do in return, as that’s only available to buyers….!) but eventually, I got that removed and he was listed as a ‘non-payer’. (To be fair, Ebay gets a lot of stick but in this instance, they were very understanding and helpful, especially as the buyer’s ‘threatening’ emails were all recorded on Ebay’s own system!)
Prior to my auction ending, I had been contacted by someone asking if I would deliver the bike to Bicester, if they paid the starting bid. I agreed, but they interpreted that as a ‘done deal’, and I had to explain that they’d have to await the auction outcome, as I never ended auctions early; in the end, they never actually bid! However, after this latest cock-up, I got back in touch with them and thankfully, they were happy to still do the deal – phew!
It then turned out that they were a prestigious Lotus car dealer, and that they wanted the bike for a client in….Japan! My partner Linda and I drove the bike up to their dealership in my Mercedes van, got the cash, and everyone was happy – eventually!
Exporting a (48-year old) Japanese bike to Japan, eh – how cool is that?
As ever, thanks to my partner Linda O’Connell for help with some of the photographs.
oldjapbikeguyUK 