Drag Katana

Image - via Stickys Speed Shop

#SteelheartEngineering #StickysSpeedShop #SuzukiKatana #DragBike #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage

Spondon Drag Katana

#Spondon #SuzukiKatana #Streetfighters #Mercenary #MercenaryGarage

Bastos

This bike featured in one of the early issues of Streetfighters Magazine in the very early '90s. From memory it was a GPZ 750 motor in a scratch-built frame and it ran on a daytime only MOT with no lights.

Back then, Streetfighter was a broader catch-all term for custom bikes with an emphasis on performance and the machines featured in the magazine were weird, eclectic and interesting - Not just a GSXR with it's tail in the air and a gas-mask for a nose fairing, owned by a man in a Predator helmet...

#Bastos #Streetfighter #StreetfightersMagazine #Mercenary #MercenaryGarage

Streetfighters Magazine

Streetfighters Magazine started off as a spin-off of Back Street Heroes (BSH) in the early '90s. BSH was (and still is) largely concerned with choppers and customs but from time to time it would feature more performance oriented machines - Katanas, GPZs etc.

There was, and still is, a divide between 'Custom' and 'Performance' motorcycle magazines and Streetfighters was set up to appeal to sections from both markets. It started out as a sporadic publication and (IIRC) continued this way for a couple of years before becoming a monthly publication sometime around 93/94.

Those early editions were amazing! The idea of what constituted a streetfighter hadn't really been formulated yet and the bikes featured were wildly eclectic. Two-strokes, turbos, supermotos, '70s muscle-bikes, '90 super-bikes - anything was fair game as long as it was a bit weird (and ideally had 17" wheels, a lairy paint job and a turbo).

I still have most of those early issues and occasionally I still flick through them when the nostalgia takes me. They're brilliant!

By about 94/95 things became a bit more formulaic. The focus tended to be on big Suzukis and big Kawasakis but with enough variety to keep things interesting. I used to buy the magazine religiously and I still have all those issues too,

However, the magazine went into a decline (in quality, not popularity) in the latter half of the 90s. Presumably the writers were getting paid by the word but nobody was checking to see if the words made any sense. The magazine had always had a slightly Gonzo approach to journalism, but a lot of the articles were complete rubbish. Typically, the writer would throw together an egotistical rant about something unrelated to the motorcycle that the article was ostensibly about and then finish up with a brief rundown of the spec-sheet. I think the reasoning was that people only bought the magazine to look at the pictures. Maybe that was even true...

Some time around the millennium, Streetfighters was bought out by one of the British tabloids (The Mail? The Mirror?) and the quality nosedived! The editorial tone went from being irreverent to being yobbish, the paper went from glossy to pulp and the content went from eclectic to predictably dire. And it was around that point that I stopped buying it.

So over the last fifteen years or so I've only bought about a half dozen copies just to see if it had got any better and it never had...

The magazine finally folded in 2013.

Anyway, apparently it's being relaunched in May of this year. It would be nice if the editorial team would go and have a look back over some of those early editions to see what a great publication it was when it first started...

#StreetfightersMagazine #Mercenary #MercenaryGarage

POST NO.1

My friend Evan dropped this GPZ out to the workshop last week. He picked it up a few months ago in Cork as a non-runner. He did some work to it and got it running again but it didn’t run very well so he asked me to take a look at the electrics.

So the wiring loom is a complete mess. It still has the bulk of the original wiring but it’s been hacked and bodged and is a bit melty in places! The loom has a single fuse and dozens of scotch-locks and all the redundant wiring (idiot lights, right-hand switch gear and most of the stuff going to the headlights) is rolled into a ball and abandoned to its fate.

I surgically removed all the dodgy wiring and in the end, all that was left were the electrical components – no wiring left at all! I’ve fitted a proper fuse box and begun wiring it all back up again. I hope to get it finished over the Easter weekend.

When I saw the bike, I thought it looked familiar – I had an idea that I’d seen it in a magazine back in the 90’s. So the other night I was in the workshop looking at the GPZ and wondering about this. I had an Idea it was probably in Streetfighters Magazine but which one? 

I’ve hundreds of magazines in the workshop and to go through all of them would take hours. But I didn’t feel much like doing any real work so I started at the beginning and after only a couple of minutes I found it – Streetfighters Issue 12 April/May 1994.

Streetfighters Issue 12 April/May 1994

The bike has changed somewhat over the last 19 years. The bodywork is undoubtedly the same but the tasty GSXR 1100 upside-down front end has been replaced with a less tasty front end off a Honda. Likewise, the ZXR 750 rear wheel and swingarm.

According to the Streetfighters article, the bike had some kind of flatslide carbs – these are now gone too, replaced with CV carbs off God-knows-what. I suspect that these carbs are going to cause problems later  - not least because there are no vacuum take-offs on the carbs or on the inlet rubbers so there’s no way to hook up a carb balancer.

CV Carbs - Hopefully actually off a GPZ 1100

The original 4:1 V&H pipe has been replaced by what looks like a very unusual 4:2 Harris. Mercifully, the two square headlights in their aluminium bezel are also gone.

Streetfighters Issue 12 April/May 1994

Streetfighters Centerfold - April/May 1994

Presumably a reference to the unusual square headlights.

AP Lockheed twin-piston calipers. The bleed nipples are inboard so the calipers have to be removed to bleed the brakes. WTF ?

AP Lockheed master cylinder - Very rare. Cast from molten B-17 bombers back in the 1850s. True fact!

Later Post on This Bike

#GPZ1100 #KawasakiGPZ #StreetfightersMagazine #Mercenary #MercenaryGarage