Raizer

Probably have more from the build I can post, but not tonight. Have had issues with a nasty scraping clicking sound from the engine, at first I put it down to top end noise and tried to ignore it, but last time I had the cylinder off I got the Mrs to kick it over and the sound was still there, following my ear I'm 95% sure it's coming from inside the disc valve assembly. I'd noticed that at some point someone had munched up the heads of the 5 screws holding the inner valve plate in and the cross's were all jagged and rubbing on the plate, I replaced them when I put it together but the disc has a few decent gouges in it. I'm hoping the solution arrived today. Looking at the SGP stickers, there's NOS from the 70's, 90's and fresh new parts. Going to attempt cutting the disc for more nangs while I'm at it, have found a few timing specs to go off, so fingers crossed it works out!

I've got a van with bike racks and a trailer if it comes to the support vehicles being over laden ha

Yeap I know. Will be lone welcome party + support stop if needed again.

Be prepared for checkpoints and increased police presence on day 2.

He's a good cunt!

Hmmm, that'll make changing the tyre a pain... Perfect! But then the K50 cylinder came with this: And just to make tyre changes easy Dropped it 25mm, ended up with the swingarm level, which for some reason is pleasing to my eye on any bike

Back to the engine, 120psi-ish and zero acceleration in fifth or on any incline wasn't going to cut it!! Soo back to the lathe!! That's the factory 41mm bore head, added a 2mm squish band to take it out to the 45mm it needed to be to suit the cylinder and also took .5mm off the face for luck! Can see just how much deeper the aftermarket finned soup bowel is! And the plug after pesting about in Auckland, looking a touch rich if anything. So added another .45mm base gasket, .4mm head gasket and ended up at .86mm squish with the refreshed factory head fitted, looking for some .2 copper sheet to make another head gasket out of to gain just a little bit more nang. Much better! And I think it would have come up a bit higher if I could have got the rubber push in fitting to seal better in the plug hole. Drastic improvement to power, shift at the right time to keep it on pipe and it will pull to the top of fifth now! BUT now that it has compression it wants a lot more fuel!! Have to order some pilot jets from MikuniOZ for it as once warmed up it is running HOT and has the worst lean hang I've ever come across Suzuki used a non adjustable version of the Mikuni VM16 so there's no screw to fiddle with to try and make it happier in the mean time, so a little A50 waits again as I've put too much into this thing just to melt it down in the quest to pest! Oh and as it turns out, having more than 6 and 8 or so psi in the tyres really improves acceleration... Who'd of figured... Think this post has the engine work pretty much up to date, until the bits I ordered yesterday arrive in NZ at least So here's a pic of @Archetype hard at work transforming the whole look of the bike

So as it turns out there is NOTHING in the way of a big bore kit for an A50 available, I can find listings for them from no later than 2005 so a bolt on A50 kit quickly became not an option. But I did discover that until recently Suzuki made another model, the K50 that was essentially a 3 or 4 speed low power version that was popular in Europe, main difference seemed to be that the K50 used a reed valve set up instead of the rotary disc valve found in the A series. Pics looked good so figured the 45mm kit would be good to go, so I ordered a kit from Denmark along with a new head, center stand, kick starter and other bits, also learnt that Danish KR is worth almost twice the NZ$ of Swedish KR Looks good right? Wrong Close to throwing a cover over it and walking away for a while a mate took my factory cylinder, welded on a new fin and said he'd hone it out after I ported it to try and get rid of at least the worst of the chamfering gouging. WIN! Or at least a win until I started trying to port it... The cylinder wall was paper thin and crumbly between the bore and the port, even a light touch with the die grinder just ripped chunks off So back to the K50 option... Black K50, Green A50 CNC plasma cut adaptor Cylinder skirt hit the crank webs and the cooling fins fouled the engine cases, so a bit of high precision engineering took place Cut a couple 1.6mm base gaskets to get the port timing right Not great! But we can fix that, we have the technology The kit head seemed to have come from a soup bowl factory Close to 3mm came off that! Fitted the clutch cover etc and gave it a couple kicks to check compression Not great, but better than the factory 95psi rating at least. Fired it up at 10:30pm one night, in the house, using air freshener as engine start so I didn't break my Mrs no petrol or engine start in the house rule... 2nd kick and it burst into life!!! And since it was so late, the exhaust port was all the exhaust it had and I didn't warn her, my Mrs just about had kittens hahahaha Spare room smelt like a warm summer breeze and I'm now banned from the air freshener, but I was so happy to hear it run!! Next day I fitted the pipe and pushed it outside, tipped a few liters of premix in and ran it for a couple heat cycles, once the rings bedded in a bit compression came up to closer to 120psi too. Fuel tap leaked like a sieve though. Sorted! Still a bit more to cover on the engine, it's actually still an ongoing thing, but you've read enough of my drivel for now lol

Oh, new page? Might as well do a post on the engine instead of go to bed then. The engine is still a work in progress, with a long term plan of swapping it out for something like an RG150 or similar unit but thats long term and I figure I might as well do what I can with the factory engine in the mean time right? My plan was just to get it running and give it a coat of paint, but that plan lasted for all of 5 minutes before I hit order on a 45mm piston kit along with some other goodies from Sweden Sent the original cylinder off for a rebore, anyone that reads the bike spam thread knows how that ended up though... While waiting for it to come back I set about cleaning, painting and changing all the seals and bolts etc etc on the bottom end. (That smell hung around in the oven for a week, I still hear about it now ha!) New points and condenser fitted up too And then this

Oh yeah, cheers to @MopedNZ for the Shikos. 70/90-17 and 90/80-17 which works out to 2.72 and 3.54 in the old money, or to put it another way: huge compared to the factory tyre sizing!!

While we're on the subject of human contact points might as well cover the bars. The A range had 3 different bar options, bug antenna, MX and low bar, of course this came with the most common option, bug antenna! Tried out a random China scooters bars from my junk pile Close, but no. Then @GuyWithAviators offered a pair of bars from a Vmoto Millan of all things, worth a try That'll do it! But that speedo looks rude sitting up there! Much better! And as luck would have it the Vmotto bars are pretty much the same as the rare A50 low bars, so when I accidentally ordered a low bar clutch and throttle from Suzuki they fitted right on without any shortening! @chris r gave me a hand to solder up the end of the new brake cable though.

As much as I wish I could take credit for the pics, they are the work of @MichaelJFox But here's some of mine, just need to step back in time a bit! Anyone who knows Suzuki "A bikes" knows the the seats are huge long things, and sure enough mine was too and I knew from before I picked the bike up from John that the facotry seat would never fit the direction I wanted to take this build, but the almost typical skateboard seat really isn't my style -the goal for this bike was always a clean build that if you didn't know something wasn't factory then you'd be left wondering. One of the first things I did was pull the old cover and foam off the seat Then chopped it up Before putting it back together Stepping forward in time again the week before Labour Weekend old mate @64valiant worked his magic on it While he was shaping foam I was at home making a taillight + plate bracket (among other tasks that I'll detail in the following posts) To say I'm happy with how it's turned out would be a major understatement!!

Been building this up since picking it up from @Bellicose at the end of August, so happy to be back on an A50! Thanks again to @Bellicose, @64valiant, @Truenotch, @Archetype, @MichaelJFox, @MopedNZ, @Shakotom, @GuyWithAviators and everyone else who helped out along the way! 77 Suzuki A50, 45mm K50 big bore kit, Jamarcol expansion exhaust, lots of new genuine parts and a lot of other things done. Will post up some pics of the build later probably