This is a story of how I got into fixing and sometimes selling inline fours. For twenty something years Joan and I lived in the tropics, on the island of Guam. All three of our children were raised there. In the mid 80s the Guam Police Dept rode Suzuki GS550 bikes, each one customized as police bikes. When they reached a certain budget limit, they were put into a yard and then auctioned off. The first time they did this there were probably 20 bikes, all blue with one man seats, police paraphernalia all over each one, etc. Some had less than 3,000 miles on them. Some had very little wrong with them when they were parked. They had just reached their budget limit. I put in a bid of $75 each and won about 15 of them. I borrowed a neighbors pick up and spent days transporting them back to the house we were renting. Over the next year and a half I fixed most of them. To convert them into regular GS550s, on one of my trips back home to New Zealand, I found huge warehouses of used bike parts. I bought as many seats, front and rear fenders as I could find and mailed them back to Guam. Then, back on Guan started painting some of the bikes black ( they were all blue and white), and advertised them in the local newspaper (The Pacific Daily News) as Suzuki Phantoms. Over a period of about ten years, I bought and sold about 50 of these bikes. Being a small island, with a limited and sometimes familiar market, I bought back about half a dozen of them and resold them. Of those half a dozen, I bought back three and resold them. In other words three of these ‘Suzuki Phantoms’ I sold three times. To give you an idea of their condition, one of them with less that a thousand miles on it, had a hole between the crankcase and the cylinders. It had been caused by about half an inch of the gasket being blown out. I have no idea why. But the repair would have put the bike beyond its allocated maintenance budget. I stared at that bike for weeks before deciding to just lay the bike on its side, clean that little hole out with carb cleaner and then filled it with JBWeld. It worked fine. I kept that bike for years. During that time I started repairing bikes for others. Our driveway was always cluttered with bikes. That’s how it all got started, I never did take pics unfortunately at least not digital. This was the 80s, Graham
Sent from my iPad -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Nighthawk Motorcycle Lovers!" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/nighthawk_lovers. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
