The Silver Surfer

The Surfer’s clutch had been getting steadily worse in how much it was rattling around when I was letting it out, so I thought I should pull it apart to check out what was causing it.I got the cover off and all the plates out no worries and they all looked good. I had a bit of trouble getting the clutch nut off and ended up making my own special clutch basket holding tool mkII (mkI didn’t work)

Once the basket was off, it was obvious what the problem was. One of the input shaft bearings in the gearbox had totally fragged itself, so the only option was to pull the engine and split the cases. 

I’m so glad I’d already done this on my old ZX9R, so doing it on the Surfer was a piece-of-piss in comparison. Once the bearing was out, I took it out to a local specialty bearing place who looked at me like I had two heads. They couldn’t get anything like it in, so I had to go OEM from CMC. I was very surprised to learn that they still had 108 of them in the warehouse in Japan (now 107) and it would cost me only $61 and a three week wait to have one shipped in. In the meantime I spent the bits of spare time I had freezing out in the garage cleaning up the grooves on the clutch basket, cleaning out and checking the oil pump, cleaning the bits of metal of the sump pan, checking the thickness of the friction plates, fixing the neutral light problem and generally giving everything a good once over so it would go together smoothly when the bearing turned up. Luckily it looks like the oil filter caught any stray bits of metal that didn’t settle in the sump pan and the rest of the internals look to be in perfect nick ….although I think when the thing was last put together when the previous owner put the 720 kit in it, the workshop must’ve got the apprentice to do it….nothing really bad, but a few things could’ve been done better.Once the bearing turned up I was straight out to the garage and started putting it back together.







It actually went together quite well without any hassles….that is until I tried to fire it up for the first time. Bugger! It won’t start. I spent ages going through the normal troubleshooting, checking everything from plugs to leads to carbies. Finally after a few days of stuffing around I finally tracked it down to a few bits of metal that the magnets in the ignition pickups had attracted. It must’ve been stuffing around with the magnetic field so one of the coils wasn’t firing. I took it out for a long way home ride and it still wasn’t 100%, but an adjustment on the timing and a good clean of the pod filters seemed to fix that up and it’s running sweet again.


Damn I love riding this bike when it’s running well!    

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Originally uploaded by mickczx10r

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been that long since I last did an update.

The clearcoat went on the tank and it’s had a rub back and polish. It doesn’t look too bad at all but I think I’ll end up redoing it at some stage as I’m not entirely happy with the colours.

Given how nice and shiny it looks, it had to go out for an old dunger’s run up to Honeysuckle and despite the rain, it still looked fantastic.

Despite the delays mentioned earlier, I finally got to mask the tank up and put the second colour on so the tank matches the duck tail. I’m pretty happy with how it looks, but I’ll be waiting a few weeks for it to settle down before I wack a few coats of clear onto it to really bring out the shine.

You know the one, it’s where something you’ve spent weeks working on, have looking just how you want it and are close to completing, suddenly heads in the wrong direction and you can’t do anything to stop it hitting the ground. Yep, the tank off the Surfer slid off the paint stand and hit the deck just when I was about to start putting the tape on the mask up for the second colour.

This meant I had to rub back the dented spots, fill, prime and sand them, then get the base colour back on before I could even think about the second colour again, so another couple of weeks down the drain.

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Originally uploaded by mickczx10r

Here’s a of dodgy pic of how the repaint of the tank is going. I stripped it back to bare metal and discovered exactly how many times it’s been dinged and patched before…I’m surprised I can fit any petrol in it at all!

Of course this meant I’ve had to redo all of the previous repairs, which has taken me weeks to get to a stage that I am happy with. It’s got about three coats of the lighter colour on it at the moment, and I plan to ride around with this for a few weeks to make sure it’s all dried out properly. I’ll then give it a light sand to make sure it’s smooth again, put another coat of the light on the top, then mask off the stripes and paint it in the darker colour so it matches the ducktail. You should be able to see the darker colour on the sidecovers in this shot. Once the darker colour is on, it’ll get a liberal dosing of clearcoat, then when that’s totally dry it’ll get rubbed back and polished up to a mirror finish like the sidecovers and ducktail

Given this shot doesn’t show the colour real well, the lighter colour is almost a perfect match for the titanium paint on the Crim.

Yep, it’s true, the Surfer got airborne on the Canberra Riders Wank Factor Ride which I was only meant to be there taking photos for. Whickle convinced me to have a go at the jumps and I couldn’t resist the chance to show some of the less impressive efforts how it is done properly…

The shots of all the bikes can be found in the link above but these ones by misko show it best…

I’ve pretty much accepted the Surfer is going to be a never ending project with small changes constantly being made to improve things while still trying to keep it on the road. The trial rattlecan paintwork I did on the spare side covers and duck tail has come up pretty well…so well in fact that I’m going to continue it onto the tank. I even spent one of those 40 C weekends in front of the air-conditioner repainting the tank badges, so when the tank is done it should look a million bucks.

The Surfer also had another trip last weekend, this time up to Wakefield Park for Rd1 of the PCRA on the Sunday so I could take photo’s of Gos in action on the 7/11. The race pics are on CanberraRiders, but I thought I’d chuck this one of the Surfer in here as well.

I was a bit dubious at first, but Gos convinced me I should take the Surfer on the Swim Ride. I wasn’t 100% sure what my fuel range would be and I didn’t really know how well it would go for long, sustained high speed runs.

Well I should’ve known that it was never going to have any problems…yet again the Surfer has shown was a capable bike it is.

There were only a couple of minor things that needed to be sorted out before I could do the run. First was a fuel economy run, which involved seeing if I could 200km out of a tank with some “mixed” riding. Check, it did it no worries.

Second up was an issue highlighted when I hit a mid-corner bump and had a brown-undie moment on the Corin dam road doing the economy run. $1.20 in each fork leg fixed that one (will have to drop it back to $1.00 though) so Check, handling sorted.

Third up was the other issue highlighted by the economy run was “rider comfort”. Unlike Mel, I don’t have a butt-of-steel, and the poor excuse for foam that was left on the seat was not going to make it a fun ride. Enter Gos and the 4th Dimension, one nice and soft z650 seat off his commuter bike and my arse is floating on air. Check, comfy arse assured.

The last one was the front brakes. They’d developed a bit of a squeal since putting the new EBC pads in. I gave them a bit of a clean, but unfortunately they managed to get worse over the duration of the trip. They were so bad I could hear them when Gos was riding the Surfer and he was two bikes behind me. I’ve solved this since I’ve gotten back, but they were pretty embarrassingly loud the whole trip.

The other big thing that happened on the trip was that a few km’s out of Cooma the Surfer went around the clock. I have no idea how many times it’s done it before but I have photo’s of it happening.

So the Surfer had a ball in the Snowies, managed to surprise a whole new batch of people at how well it goes, and even managed to cover about 870km and end up running better than when it left. Sweet!

As you can see it’s been a while since my last update and quite a few things have happened in that time, unfortunately one of them hasn’t been a lot of riding (aside from commuting of course). For various reasons I seem to have been affected by a severe dose of antisocialitis…the side effect being that I haven’t really wanted to go out on any group rides.I have spent a bit of time in the garage though, putting all the bits and pieces on the Surfer that I ordered from the States while I’ve been waiting for the head to be finished. Which leads to the biggest bit of news…the head is finally back! At this stage I’ll say a big thanks to Gos for his tireless efforts in chasing up when it would be finished…thanks mate.

All I ever seem to be doing is waiting at the moment.

Waiting for the Surfer’s head to be welded, waiting for parts I ordered to come from the states, waiting for panels to be painted and the screen to come in for the Crim, waiting for my new job to start, waiting to go up to Lochmaree for a dirty weekend with the KLR, waiting for the dreaded lurgee to go away, waiting, waiting, waiting…

….so can you tell I hate having to wait for things