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Having decided to go on the annual Phase One trail riding trip to Usana in the Spanish Pyrenees with Denise, and not to ride bicycles this time, we had to face the problem of having no equipment or motorcycles with only 6 weeks to go. I got on e-bay and started buying boots, body armour, helmets, gloves, goggles, shirts and all the other equipment as it came up cheap. The plan was that all of this will be sold on again on E-bay after a week's use, hopefully at a small profit but as least breaking even! I was also looking at every dirt bike that came up within 75 miles of Bristol, was between 126 and 700cc and had an MOT and was less than £500. It is rather crazy but it seems to be almost impossible to buy such a machine for less than £700 - which is significantly more than I brought both these perfectly good and MOTed cars for!
After a couple of weeks I was giving up hope of getting a bike in my price bracket. I thought that the £500 would have to be extended to £1000 even buying on E-Bay! Nothing in my (extremely broad) specification was selling for less than £700. Then, very much to my surprise, my bid of up to £650 won this 1990 Kawasaki KMX200! I was away on business for 24 hours and had to bid 20 hours before the auction ended, unseen. I was even more surprised to find that not only had I won, but the usual last minute scramble of bids had not occurred and it was mine for well under £400!
The frame is brush painted red and it came with 2 boxes of rusty bits and an assortment of problems, mostly declared on E-bay and generally not too much trouble to sort out with the Phase One facilities at my command!
I collected it on a rainy night - not a great way to have your first ride on a motorbike for 25 years! The first problem was very apparent - a mix of a knobbly front tyre and a road rear which resulted in the most strangely handling motorcycle I have ever ridden, although the problem covered further down probably was not helping much either. The whole bike refused to hold any sort of line at all with a feeling that the front wheel was made entirely of rubber rather than just the edge of it! An almost new tyre from E-Bay should even things up a bit and make it fit for the trails around Ainsa!
At some point in its past the rear light had been taken off the mudguard and re-installed upside down - rather poor engineering that this is possible as it means the lens does not quite fit properly and had been filling with muddy water making the light rather dim. I took it to bits and put it all back together after a good clean.
I thought about off road crash proofing and the rear indicators will unscrew easily and stow under the seat so that I can put them back on if we go on a road day - we fancy a trip to Andorra! Also a more sensible number plate would be required!
I made one up out of a part of the Super Dump Tin that got taken off during it's weight loss programme! I also made one for the other bike (more of that on another page!).
I covered them with reflective yellow tape taken from an old riders armband, made some letters using the official number plate lettering font and then covered the whole lot with clear fablon for good measure! I think you would have to really annoy someone to get picked up for riding off road with this, not that I am planning to ever do that in the UK. It might be used as an emergency commuter if one of the cars breaks down but that is about it. We took the normal plates as well just in case we felt like doing a day trip on the road somewhere.
The E-Bay ad said the KIPS cover was leaking and it was. I took the metal cover off and sealed it up with high temperature instant gasket. So far it seems to be holding...
The cover on the other side was leaking as well. This one is plastic and just covers some sort of drive mechanism for the KIPS valve which is in the cylinder head between the two covers. The rubber bit that goes into the bottom is a bit old, hardened and deformed so I cleaned it all off and sealed it all up with some fantastic liquid plastic I got to water proof the headlamps on the race bikes. So far it seems to be holding...
I moved the forks up 5mm in the yokes to give my aging hips a chance and Denise's feet a chance of reaching the floor!
The rear brake return spring was very rusty and not bringing the lever up very positively so I replaced it with something a bit stronger and shiner. The pivot was also extremely worn so I drilled it out to the next size and put a bigger bolt through. I checked the gearbox oil and it was in superb condition, although I had to do this by dipping as it is impossible to see anything through the little window!
This job was also mentioned on the ad and I was not bothered as it is very simple to fix a dripping carburetor, especially if you have a spare one! The little spring loaded valve attached to the floats which controls the level was very worn but there was a good one in the spare so I replaced that along with its seat. Then it took me early a week to get the bike running again! I set it up according to the Haynes manual but that did not work so in the end I just went as high as it could conceivably be and worked down until it ran well! I also replaced the drain valve as the head was mangled.
At the same time I was trying to fix the two broken kill switches (as advertised) fitted to the bike, which confused the issue of which job it was that was stopping the bike from running! The normal kill switch had failed due to the wires being pulled out and rather than solder them back in a second switch had been fitted. This one works by shorting the ignition onto the handlebar but whoever fitted it had clearly not considered the need to scrape the paint off the handlebar so that contact could be made. Thus it was very easy to fix both switches and put some connectors in and tape the whole lot up the bar to tidy it up a bit. I considered putting the after market switch on the other side but more pressing jobs needed doing!
The bike has clearly had some pretty serious off road use judging by the amount of scrapes on the bottom of the rear shock linkage (just to left of blue arrow), presumably by a previous owner to the last one judging by the road tyre he had fitted to it. There has also been a really big impact to the linkage (pink arrow) which had dented it in sufficiently to deform that lower shock bearing letting water in and completely rusting it away! This should have been immediately evident to whoever passed the MOT on it and it certainly did not happen since then judging by the state of rustiness of what was left of the bearing. There was a very obvious clunk if you lifted the rear of the bike. I beat out the remains of the bearing and then sorted out the linkage a bit before pushing in a new bearing that I pressed out of a broken link from a Suzuki race bike using the hydraulic press at Phase One. There is also some play in the swing arm pivot but I assessed this as not bad enough to warrant working on. The bearing in the centre pivot is in good condition. The pale blue arrow points to the lovely hand painted red frame - more rust red in the underbelly area!
Just before packing the bike into Russell's van I noticed the front forks were squeaking and Russell diagnosed a total lack of rebound damping. After a brief discussion I took the screws out of the bottom of the fork legs and removed the air valves in the top so that I could blow out the mixture of water and brown (left fork) and grey (right fork) sludge. Russell kindly donated some fork oil and the whole thing was much improved although it makes me wonder how long the oil will stay inside if water can get in there! I had already checked the forks were not pitted or obviously leaking under the gaiters but the lack of leaks may just have been down to the very small quantity of sludge inside to leak out! Hopefully it will not be so bad that we cannot get by for a week with messy forks and regular top-ups!
The other big job was to replace the bodged up handlebar lever pivot bolts and cure the heavy clutch. The bolts are supposed to be stepped and screwed into the bottom of the fork part which goes either side of the lever. They had been replaced by a steel bolt and a steel screw, both of which were using thread as the bearing surface. This was doing a good job of wearing the aluminium away around the holes! The reason for doing this had been to mount the hand guards which had been fitted.
This is the clutch side as finished. I found a suitable piece of tube to bush out the upper and lever holes which just fitted them outside and just fitted the new high quality bolts with shank down to below the lever bearing surface. A nyloc nut on the bottom keeps it all in place without pinching the forks. I also rigged up a funnel around the clutch cable to get some oil down it as it was very stiff. The result was a lovely smooth clutch action.
The front brake side was a bit more problematical. While trying to figure out what was going on with it and fix the light switch I did not realise that the fitted system was compressing the forks on the very worn brake lever and ended up over tightening them and breaking off the lower side of the fork! I ordered another one from a scrapper on E-Bay and found that the master cylinder I had was from a Suzuki and the banjo bolt which connects it to the brake line had a different thread to the Kawasaki master cylinder - which had come without a banjo bolt! With only 3 days left before the bikes had to be loaded for Spain (which meant riding it to Phase One HQ) I ordered another master cylinder and asked the previous seller to send one on in the hope that one or the other would arrive in time! The second new master cylinder (including banjo bolt specifically asked for!) arrived overnight and amazingly had the perfect pivot bolt fitted for supporting a hand guard just like mine!
I replaced what looked like the original brake fluid and ended up with a vastly improved front brake! Plus a spare master cylinder!
All that was left was to ride it down to Bridgwater for loading - a 45mile motorway blast at 60mph. It got there OK apart from the speedo packing up and one of the indicators also (which magically resurrected itself just before I took them all off anyway). This will probably be Denise's main bike as the other one I have brought is a bit long in the leg for her even after I have let the forks up through the yokes!
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Page updated on 15 October 2009
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