I bought 3 bikes just before Christmas - a Yamaha Thundercat 600, a Triumph TT600 and this old beast. All three were advertised as projects, which is a pretty fair description. The Thundercat was a non runner, the Triumph was belching white smoke and had very obviously been dropped and the FZR was both a non runner and in pretty bad cosmetic shape. In beauty pageant terms it looked like it had been smacked on the arse with a wet kipper and then fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every single branch on the way down. To make matters worse it would turn over but wouldn't start, although it did have a nice big fat old spark on it.
like with many bikes of this era it is missing most of it's fairing panels, they are really hard to find now, which is why so many get turned in to track day naked bikes or flat trackers.
this one is well worth saving as it has only done 14,000 miles. I will probably sell it as a running project once it is mechanically sorted.
First job was to pull the carbs and give them a really good clean - it had been fitted with two K and N free flow filters - I hate those things. I knew the fuelling was standard as I had checked the jet sizes when I cleaned the carbs - the mains were 102.5's. I wacked the idle screws out another 1 1/2 turns each to try and richen up the tickover mixture a bit in the hope I could get some life out of it and went indoors to order 4 125 size jets.
I did manage to get it to stumble in to life but it would not rev beyond 5,000 and was spitting flames out the exhaust and generally sounding pretty nasty. Definitely needs work.
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