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Bottom line - not recommended mainly due to safety concerns unless you are willing (and able) to invest the money in the right safety and compressor equipment.
One of the fellows in the RMS branch of the CVMG had mentioned to me, that there was a local outfit here in Calgary offering do-it-yourself sand blasting by the hour so I thought I'd give them a try. Consolidated Compressor is in the east industrial area of Calgary and the rates are quite reasonable. They have about 8 stations, and on any given day you will find several people happily blasting away as per the photo to the right. As I was new to this, one of the folks there stepped me through the 'how tos' before I got started. It isn't a difficult process - basically just point and shoot, taking care not to get parts of your own body in the way ! They supply instructions, gloves and ear plugs, a fully enclosed helmet with external air supply, work areas where you can clamp your work, and all the compressed air and sand you need. Long sleeves and long trousers are a must, and as well it is also a good idea to not park your car too close, just in case you point things in the wrong direction ! The process is fast - paint, rust, etc., just flew off the work pieces I had, and the resultant bare metal finish is ready to go for paint or additional metal working as required.
I have to assume the same sort of service is available in other cities, and if not then that's a shame because its a great idea !
Go back to the TopOne of the (many) little challenges you run into with restoring old Suzuki motorbikes is the rear view mirrors. The ones that originally came with the bikes in the 1970’s had a Suzuki ‘S’ embossed on the mirror, but none of the after market replacements whether from Suzuki or a third party have this. Naturally, as a result, these original, and now quite old embossed mirrors are in demand and I was following an eBay auction that ended yesterday where the ‘winner’ paid $101 for what was otherwise a $10 mirror ! Actually, I just noticed a shop in Thailand asking $9.99 for a pair of mirrors, so you don’t have to pay much if you don’t want to.
Needless to say, the demand for these mirrors provides an incentive to preserve the ones people already own - and it is not uncommon for folks to install cheap mirrors for general around town riding, and save the embossed ones for shows and events.
I just picked up another bike (a 1974 Suzuki GT550) which
looks
really
nice but in addition to not running also came without mirrors. As I
have a few embossed mirrors that would fit it but with broken mirror
glass, I thought I’d s
pend
a day and see if I could I could just repair a set that I had. The
starting point is shown to the upper left - the key parts are the
mirror disc, the rubber beading that holds the mirror in place, a paper
spacer that goes in behind the mirror glass, and the old embossed
mirror mount. I had to carefully bend the backing a bit to get its
original shape back as the back had originally been hit and the mirror
arm had been pushed inwards with enough force to break the original
glass. After gently (and also not so gently !) massaging it for a
while, I was ready to try and add the glass. To the right you see the
mirror backing ready to accept the glass. The new mirror glass
replacements I got by taking apart suitable third party mirrors which
are readily available from many sources - standard mirror glass isn’t
suitable, as the mirror is slightly convex to give a wider field of
view of the traffic 
behind
you. I found that at least for the ones I
used, I could carefully pull the rubber edging at the point where it is
seamed, and then the mirror disc you need for the repair is easily released.
I used a heat gun to warm up the metal backing, and then basically pushed the mirror with the edging installed on the edge of the glass disc and very slightly lubricated with some dish detergent (the wider side of the rubber edging, as seen in the photo to the left, goes to the back of the glass disc), until the glass ‘popped’ into place, at which point I adjusted the fit with a jeweller’s fine screw driver so that everything was equally spaced around the edges. If anyone plans to try this themselves, be sure to wear good gloves and eye protection as the glass is easy to break, and gashing your hands on broken mirror glass will definitely put a dampener on your day !
The final result looks ‘OK’. You can obviously tell that the mirror is not new, and the dents and dings are still visible in the photo to the lower left, but I chose to think of these as adding character - heck the mirrors and the bike are both about 34 years old, and its not exactly a trailer queen, so I don’t mind it looking its age. You can see the glass side of the repaired mirror to the lower right.
Bottom line - fixing the one broken mirror gave me a matched set of rare and increasingly expensive embossed Suzuki mirrors for the newest addition to the garage, so I’m happy.
It has been the most frustrating past few days - I have spent more than just a few hours trying to figure out what the Suzuki paint code is for the colour I want to paint my GT750 project bike. It had been painted with what looked to be 1978 GS750 colours, and as that fit with my design premise I had planned to go with the same colour scheme. I am wiser now.
I had originally thought it
would be fairly simple - the ownership/registration sa
id
it was 'brown', and the side covers and original tank certainly looked
brown, but there was an obvious snag with this - none of the
GT750's were actually 'brown', so that meant that the
registration
must have
been changed at some point from the original (whatever that was) when
it was re-done in GS750 colours. Unfortunately when you start to dig
into things, the colour 'brown' actually doesn't show up on the Suzuki
colour listings at all, other than for tape used as tank trim in 1978,
although there is a 'brownish black' listed in 1983. To add to the
confusion, when I look at photos of 1978 GS750 Suzuki's like the one to
the right, at least a few of them certainly do look 'brownish', so it
was a bit of a puzzle which led me to do more than a few searches on
the web to try and solve it.
Although I found several good information sources, they each seemed to be short on some detail - the Ozebook site has a really good list put together by an Rick Best, which is a fantastic bit of work, but focuses on Suzuki 2 strokes between 1968 and 1977, and it doesn't include trim information and which colour combinations were used on the different models of bikes. Another really great source of information is maintained by Jarmo Haapamaki called Suzuki Cycles and which includes data and photos of almost (I'll be honest - I personally do not know of one he has missed, but I'm being cautious) every Suzuki ever made. This is a site to bookmark as the photos are invaluable, but again, it misses paint code data in many cases, and also doesn't show which colour combinations were used in each model, other than via the photos. Most of the on line fiches do not show paint code information, other than on the part numbers themselves, but having just a number and no idea what colour it actually was is not a lot of help. Suzuki part numbers of painted items are in the form 00000-00000-xxx, where the last three places on the right are the colour code. So 291 for example happens to be a semi-gloss black, and a side cover for a 1977 GT750B is part number 47211-31200-291, but just by itself, '291' doesn't tell you much.
Luckily, this is when I found Alpha Sports and I am most grateful to them - they have put on line the full fiche set for Suzuki all the way back to 1965, and most importantly, unlike most other sites, they have not left out the pages with all of the paint and colour combination information !
So - what I've been doing for the past few days, is compiling a spreadsheet with this data which is available here. A few words of caution - this is a work in progress, and as such will change. It may (most probably does) have a few errors and it is incomplete as for this first pass I've focused on the models I'm personally interested in (although I have tried to capture all the models between 1965 and 1971) - I also do not plan to include bikes made after 1983 for the moment, as I'm only interested in 'vintage' bikes and I somewhat arbitrarily choose to consider those to be anything over 25 years of age ! I have cross checked it with the data provided by Rick Best on the Ozbook site, the cross part reference database from Zedder, the photos in Suzuki Cycles and spot checked against the fiche data on the Power Sport site. The sheet is offered as a PDF - if anyone has data they think should be included, or has a correction they feel I need to make (and has documentation to support it) just let me know via email at oldjapanesebikes (at) shaw (dot) ca.
And the colour for the project bike ? You'll recall that trying to resolve that puzzle is what started this journey - it turns out that what looks like brown is either a burgundy, colour code 05N or perhaps a maroon colour code 05U or 05L. Now I just have to narrow it down, and then find someone to mix it for me here in Calgary.
Go back to the Top
anything that has a lot of shape to it (a head lamp bucket for example)
and then of course what do you do once its clean ?  | In the photo to the upper right, the fork ear in the lower left has not been treated, and the one in the lower right of the same photo has been. The item on the top of the photo shows one half of the rear of a fork cover completed, and half still to go. Likewise the gauge bezel to the left has a lot of rust on the inside, and can be seen to the right after soaking in the Evapo-rust solution for about 12 hours. The rust has been removed, and what is left are a few dark grey areas to which I've applied some normal metal polish to act as a sealer. In other cases, where the back will not be visable, I've just painted it with a rust preventative paint such as Tremclad. I find that any oil or grease on the item being treated slows down the rust removal process, and as well the temperature of the liquid is best kept up in the high teens (celsius) as cooler temperatures also seem to slow the conversion process. |  |
