We met up again fairly soon, the RG had been pronounced fit and well and Pete had a handful of photos to inspire me. Oh, and a slight change of plan; “I’ve ordered a fibreglass fairing and single seat unit….off a MK9 RG500”. Now, I’m a bike fan, I know a fair bit about bikes and I have been working with bikes for a long time. Alarm bells started to ring: Firstly, fibreglass is a nightmare to paint. There are so many imperfections in gel coats and every pit mark and minor crack shows up, because for some reason, paint just won’t stick to them. Also, most fibreglass panels are rarely flat so you end up with a bit of a rippled finish unless you do an awful lot more preparation work than normal. Secondly, and most importantly as far as I was concerned, is that I know the MK9 RG500 bears as much resemblance to the road going RG500 as an R1 bears to Rossi’s M1 MotoGP bike, i.e. next to nothing! Even fibreglass fairings designed for the bike you’re fitting them on are tricky to get to line up properly and I knew that there was no way the full-on race bike fairing was going to be anywhere near close to the road bike’s dimensions. I needed to think fast, as I really didn’t want to get involved with the added grief. What I needed was an S.E.P. [What’s an S.E.P, I hear you ask? Somebody Else’s Problem, of course!]. “That sounds great” I said “just get the boys at Goodalls to ‘pop’ the fairings on and then wheel it down to me”. Phew, got out of that!
Time went by, Pete would call in every so often for a chat and a cuppa sometimes with some more pics, sometimes with a dvd or video featuring his hero, and still the RG sat in the corner of (somebody else’s) workshop, the new fairing panels still sat in the box they were delivered in. I watched the videos, I studied the photos (all of which seemed to vary in detail slightly), and then I read an article in MCN about the bikes that Sheene had restored and kept in his home in Australia. One of them just happened to be his blue and white 1984 machine. This was the bike with the non-factory engine that, as Barry put it, (and to be read in a cockney accent) ‘wouldn’t pull a boy-scout off your grandmother’, but was housed in a Harris frame to his specification that handled superbly. I remembered that, in 1984, I had made my maiden voyage on my then brand new RD350LC up to Silverstone (turns out Pete was in the crowd too!) and would have actually have seen the bike at close range as I joined in the track invasion to salute the great man at the end of the Grand Prix. If only I’d taken a bit more notice! This thing was starting to take a hold on me and I finally weakened, “Pete, I’ll have a look at the fairings for you if you want?” He didn’t need asking twice! The RG was soon wheeled down to me followed by a large box of fibreglass. I stripped the original bodywork off and realised pretty soon that my initial fears were well founded. The seat unit wasn’t too far out, though the racer’s fuel tank was obviously much longer than the road bike’s one and the standard exhausts sat some way below the exit holes in the seat unit. The bellypan was offered up next and actually sat up against the radiator well but when the nosecone was held up with the hand guards level with the handlebars, there was a good 8-inch gap between it and the bellypan. I searched the box for some kind of infill panels, but to no avail. Needless to say ,a lot of looking, placing, moving, re-placing and head scratching followed.
Eventually I decided it wasn’t going to beat me and decided on a plan of attack. I warned Pete that this wasn’t going to be a five-minute job and wanted him to be sure that this was what he wanted as it was going to be a labour intensive project and that it could easily become a bit of a money pit. Pete’s keenness couldn’t be dampened so I set to work.
For me, the priority was to get the lines of the silhouette right; the top edge of the nosecone had to be parallel with the top of the fuel tank as did the top edge of the seat unit. These were the most important factors in the bike’s ‘stance’ and I knew that time taken now would pay off later on. To enable the fairing gap to be reduced, the handlebars were lowered, then lowered some more. Then they were lowered to so far down that they looked odd! Still, even in this position they were still roughly level with the top of the saddle, similar to modern sports-bikes. There was however, a good 4-inches to find. Desperate situations call for desperate measures so I ended up sawing through the bellypan horizontally, just under the air vent, allowing the nosecone to fit properly against the piece of bellypan I’d just cut. There was now a 4-inch gap further down. I riveted a sheet of aluminium to the outside to bridge the gap on both sides and to hold it all together. I then fibreglassed from the inside to fill the gaps, using four layers of matting. I did the same to fill the gap in the seat unit too where the long fuel tank should have been. Once this had all set hard I was able to remove the aluminium sheeting and set about filling and shaping the modified panels to get a decent finish on them once again, quite a task in itself! The air vents were marked out on the top of the seat unit and cut out to mimic one of the photos we had laid out nearby.
That was about the last time Pete was allowed to see it; for me, the best part of any job is when I get to unveil the finished article and the reaction of the owner is naturally going to diminish if they’ve seen it evolving every step of the way. So, banned from my workshop, I found a couple of tasks to keep him occupied; firstly we were going to have to source a set of exhausts that I could modify enough to line up through the rear seat as the standard upper pipes are double skinned, looked awful and would have been too hard to modify. Secondly, as Pete works in a machine shop, I gave him a pattern of the rear suspension linkage and gave him dimensions for him to make a slightly longer one to jack up the rear end to give the whole thing a sportier look. The third task was to track down one of the ‘genuine’ Suzuki race bikes that Pete had seen at a bike show (the one tested by Niall McKenzie in one of the magazines), in order to get the colours right. Pete soon organised a new set of Swarbrick pipes which arrived in a box as a kit: All the different sections of the pipes, some parallel, some tapered, were there, ready to be welded up which meant I could decide exactly which way to route them. I must say that it looked to be the most intimidating jigsaw puzzle ever when it arrived! The linkage was duly made, along with some new bar-ends and Pete had arranged a private viewing of the ‘other’ RG. He was sent off with a handful of colour chips and came back with a few to choose from.
During the weeks that all this had been going on, I had been busy. Every spare moment was spent sorting the hundreds of little things out that you don’t allow for when you start something like this. The fairing support bracket was cut down and welded up to remove mirror and headlamp mountings and to add fixings for the race fairing. The battery and the electrical units had to be mounted on a plate under the hump of the new seat unit. To de-clutter the rider’s view, the ignition switch was moved away from the top yoke and attached to the rear engine mounting. I wanted to get rid of the left-hand switchgear, so modified the now redundant headlamp on/off switch on the right-hand switch-gear to use it as a horn button (it still had to be road legal). The choke cable then had to be moved and was placed on the left-hand side of the engine. I wanted to keep the 2-stroke oil tank but needed to raise it to clear the expansion chamber’s new routing, plus I wanted to be able to top it up without having to remove the race seat. The subframe had to be jacked up to support the seat at the right angle and the bracing struts (no pillions so not needed!) had to be removed at the rear to make way for the new pipes. The lower fairing brackets had to be altered to support the new belly-pan. In addition, the forks were removed, stripped, the lowers painted to match the pictures, then serviced and rebuilt. The bottom yoke was painted, the top one polished and new steering bearings were fitted. The wheels were painted, Goodrich hoses were fitted, the brake calipers were serviced and painted, and their bolts drilled and lock wired to complement the race look. Still Pete had no real idea what was going on. He’d ring every so often and I’d deliberately talk to him about the weather, the news or anything other than the RG; cruel? Nah, Just Andy’s rules! With the bodywork mounted it was time to look in the exhaust bits box. I looked, and closed the lid again and did some more work on the bodywork. Eventually I got to the point where the exhausts HAD to be done! I arranged for fellow racer and F1 exhaust pipe fabricator, 'Jumping' Geoff Cain, to come over one evening with his TIG welding equipment. I fitted each of the downpipes then I’d offer up each section, hold it while Geoff tacked it, then I’d take it off for it to be welded around. Each one was then re-fitted for the next section to be lined up and welded. I think we got out around midnight but it was a welcome sight the following morning to see the four expansion chambers with alloy stingers attached to the bike!
When I was finally happy with the fit and finish of the bodywork it was time for my favourite part, the paintwork. The fuel tank was paint-stripped to remove all traces of the original colour scheme and every thing was given a coat of etch primer and two generous coats of hi-build primer. Everything was wet-flatted with 1200 grade paper then base-coated white. The bodywork was re-fitted to ensure the lines would line up and everything that was staying white was masked up. The yellow number boards were done next and, when dry, masked up. The light blue was next, masked and finally the dark blue applied, all in base-coat. Then came the exciting bit as I got to remove the all the masking and see all the colours together for the first time. I smiled. All the edges were checked for sharpness and any overspray that had crept through the masking was removed. The bodywork was again carefully fitted back on the bike and the decals, made to my specifications by the excellent team at ‘The Image Works’ were applied. Back in the spray booth and the panels were all given two coats of clear lacquer, which was allowed to harden overnight (I couldn’t risk baking them in case the decals reacted to the heat) then everything was wet flatted with 1200 paper and given another two coats of lacquer. When fully cured, this was again wet flatted, this time with 2000 grade paper to remove any imperfections and was then buffed to a shine.
All that was left was to rebuild everything give it all plenty of wax polish and fasten it’s numberplate to the seat unit. I fuelled her up and a few kicks later she came to life, crackling out of those four expansions, lovely. I thought it was time to get Pete excited. I rang him at work and said “Pete, I’ve got someone here who wants to say hello to you” and let him listen to his bike down the phone, “So, when you picking your bike up???!!!”.
I bet the afternoon dragged by at work for him but eventually he got out and headed down to see me. I’d set the bike up on a pair of paddock stands behind our main shutter door and made him wait just a little longer! I eventually whipped the door back to unveil his machine. Pete went silent (a rare occurrence!) and just stood there, mouth open, totally gob smacked; result! He just shook his head in disbelief as he looked around it and realised that this bike was actually his! His smile was ear to ear as he put his helmet on while I warmed the engine up and he even looked a bit emotional as he swung a leg across it and headed up the road. Very rewarding.
So, that was it, my project had come good and I have to say I was pretty sad to see it go. I’d really gained an affinity with the bike but knew I’d be in good hands. I’d also made a good couple of friends in Pete and his wife Zoë and one time they came to one of my race meetings to help out with the marshalling.
They helped out at the next one too.
It just happened that the one after that was to be at Silverstone, now there’s a thought. Silverstone, the hallowed ground of those great races between Sheene and Roberts and the place we’d both visited 20 years previously to watch the legend in action; it would be kind of fitting to take the RG up there wouldn’t it, you know, get a few photos against the Silverstone backdrop. Then I got the phone call; “how do you feel about taking the RG around the track for me?”. It’s funny how just a small idea can get your mind racing! From the thought of a couple of pictures in the paddock to wondering if we could get a shot of it on the track to hey, how about actually getting to do a couple of laps of the track on it! I was already booked in on a practice day the day before the races and it seemed the perfect chance to give the bike the added credibility of being ridden in the tyre tracks of the original bike. I felt very honoured to be offered the ride and I even had a set of plain black leathers that would look the part! Of course I accepted but I had to make a condition or two: being used to using Dunlop’s finest 195 section slick on the rear of my race bike, the thought of riding a bike with a skinny little 120 section touring tyre on the bike scared me! The 15 year old standard rear shock was concerning me as well. Back the bike came to my workshop and I investigated what I could do to make the bike handle somewhere near as good as it looked. I’d heard good reports of Hagon’s range of rear shocks and convinced Pete that this would be the best thing we could do, and ordered one up. I knew I had a rear wheel out of a Suzuki GSX600F in one of my sheds and had wondered if it could be modified to fit as it was wide enough to run a 140 section tyre. As luck would have it, the spindle size was the same and the rear disc fitted! All I needed to do was order up a sprocket to fit the different cush drive, space the caliper over by 5mm of so (a little job for Pete and his lathe) and paint it yellow to match the front. The 3 spoke design not only updated the rear of the bike but matched the wheels Sheene’s bike had. Mental note to look out for a 3 spoke front next! I also managed to track down what must have been the last pair of Metzler soft compound tyres to fit the unfashionable (16 inch front) wheel sizes. The new shock arrived and I was able to set it up to match the front pretty well, a quality piece of kit for the price. While the bike was with me I also fitted a steering damper, just in case. My confidence was growing. To fund some of this added expense, all the parts we’d removed from the bike bodywork, pipes, lamps etc. were brought back down to me and I put them all on Ebay. I’d initially advised Pete to keep all the standard stuff in case he ever wanted to sell the bike as, in general, standard bikes are always worth more but the way this bike was evolving A) he wouldn’t ever want to part with it, B) if he ever did part with it I wanted first refusal and C) this was becoming one of the most desirable RGs I’d ever seen. And so, stage two of project RG was completed.
Unloading the RG from the back of the van at Silverstone caused quite a stir! In fact all day people were coming up, looking round it trying to figure out if it was the ‘real’ one and generally asking questions about it to a very proud Pete. Amazing how an old bike can cause so much interest in a paddock full of modern superbikes! My plan was to take the RG out in the very first session, do my few laps in safety and pull in early before anything happened to it, the brief being for anyone with a camera to take as many shots of it as possible so we had a chance of sifting through then and hopefully get a good snap or two. However, I had a bit of a surprise. My friend Amanda had arranged for her pro-photographer pal to come along for the day with his full-on filming kit and he spent the day following the action in the paddock and was able to get some fantastic on-track shots courtesy of his ‘get you anywhere’ press pass, all very cool! So, the moment arrived. As soon as the RG was kicked into life, a crowd gathered, the unique sound of a four cylinder two stroke catching people’s imaginations. A quick check to make sure the tyre warmers had been doing their job and I headed out, complete with my black leathers and Pete’s Bazzer replica helmet! A quick look behind as I headed up pit lane to see the blue fumes in my wake and then out onto the track. First impression was of the lightness of the bike and how quickly it wanted to change direction. I kept reminding myself to take it steady, to scrub the new tyres in properly and keep an eye out for where the cameraman was! A couple of laps in and I started to pack up the pace. I was surprised at how well it steered and everything felt to be working well. The 15 minute session went really quickly and I came back in to the pits smiling to be greeted by a beaming Pete! Kind of seemed a shame to put it away as I was just getting used to it so I though it would be best to take it out again in the next session, just for good measure. More confident in it this time I stopped thinking of how much damage Pete would do to me if I dropped it and started to push it a little. I was losing out on horsepower to the modern bikes and it didn’t pull totally cleanly as it revved towards it’s redline but I was soon chucking it through the turns enough to embarrass a few people on their rocketships! I was even having to pick my knee up around some of the right handers as it touched down and grabbed a few times as these leathers didn’t have sliders fitted! Safely back in, having thoroughly enjoyed myself, I got changed into my usual race suit and spent the rest of the day setting up my Mille for the big day ahead, the final round of the championship.
That evening, Pete and Zoë joined us ('us' being my team-mates Big Chris and Crazy Pete) in the pit garage and we shared a bottle of wine or two and chatted all things racing. As Pete’s eyes became redder (with the wine) I asked if they fancied walking the track for a bit of a guided tour. Surprised that they would be allowed to, we ventured out into the cold and dark. My commentary on racing lines may have been lost on the giggling bunch that were having trouble walking straight but I still persevered to try to make them appreciate what I would be doing the following morning as I risked life and limb for their entertainment!
The race day went well, an ‘Open’ race qualifier to get me warmed up and I netted a 3rd in the ‘Sound of Thunder’ qualifier giving me a front row start for my all important final. The ‘Open’ final was before that though and I didn’t want to risk an incident in that one on my race bike as the SoT was the only race I needed some points in. I had a word with Pete. “You know how cool it was to be able to say your bike had been ridden at Silverstone, well, how do you fancy being able to say it has been raced at Silverstone??!!”. I took Pete’s smile to mean ‘yes!’ We had already had the bike scrutineered, (if only just to get the scrutineering sticker for the fairing!) so I had a word with the organisers to see if they’d let me swap bikes for the ‘Open’ race final. Luckily, Nino and Marion had been Sheene fans and seen him race too so I got the ok! A quick leathers change while the RG went back on the tyre warmers, was fuelled and given a quick check over and we were ready. Although I had qualified well for a good grid position, I started right at the back of the grid as I didn’t want to risk being in the middle of the pack as they all arrived at the first turn at the same time, not on this bike anyway! I let the hoard of bikes ahead of me go and stayed out of trouble and then started to catch up with the group ahead. The fuelling problem had got slightly worse and it wouldn’t pull full revs but I stayed on, completed the race, wasn’t last and pulled into the pits to applause and thumbs up from Marshalls and spectators alike, excellent. A fourth in my main race netted me 3rd in the Sound of Thunder Championship so I have to say I had a thoroughly good day!
Of course, there was a sense of ‘what if’ as I looked back on my time racing the RG. I mean, I wasn’t that far behind the pack, so it made me wonder what I could have done if I had tried right from the moment the lights went out. Especially if we got the fuelling right. And maybe had some slicks instead of road based tyres. Better brakes would help. So would some more horsepower. Uh oh.
Enter stage three. With winter on its way the RG was back at my workshop. We had a plan. The bike looked stunning but it was starting to become an obsession with me and I wanted it to be as good as I could make it. There were a few bits I wanted to do cosmetically to be totally happy, mainly, the inside of the fairing needed to be painted black as at the moment it was just plain and a bit of a nightmare to keep clean. I thought I’d give the outside another couple of coats of clear to add to the depth of shine while I was at it! The engine cases were a bit scratched and needed painting and I had an idea I wanted to paint them in a matt gold colour similar to the colour of the magnesium carburettors on the works bikes of the era. Pete had an idea too. Seeing as the top end of the motor hadn’t been apart he was keen to get some new piston rings and small ends in it for peace of mind, but had talked himself (ok, so I helped persuade him a bit) into sending the heads and barrels to two stroke tuning God, Stan Stevens for a full stage-3 tune. The parts were sent off while I painted the crankcases black and the outer cases gold. Pete was given the task of sourcing new nuts and bolts for the casings and anything else I could think of and I had been secretly scanning Ebay for a front wheel to match the rear. A friend of mine, former racer Paul Thomas, popped in and saw the project and his eyes lit up; “I used to race one of those” he told me, “hey, I’ve got a braced swingarm in my loft for one if you want it?”. Turns out the swinger was used by TT supremo Brian Reid early in his career and although it had been painted black at some point, was just the job. A little bit of welding where a sprocket bolt had been touching at sometime and a professional polish and it was perfect! I won the front GSX600 wheel on EBay, and also a rear one that someone had converted from a GSXR750 which would take a 160 section (slick sized!) tyre which I couldn’t say ‘no’ to. A set of 600 Bandit discs were sourced and I gave Pete a pattern of a pair of mounting plates I needed to allow the standard calipers to fit the much bigger, floating discs. I got Pete to make some shiny new wheel and engine spacers to keep him busy too! A phone call from Stan Stevens was a bit worrying though; it seems that the barrels had been machined wrong when the bike was made and a chamfer on the upper edge of the exhaust ports meant that the bike was losing compression. The only cure would be to re-bore the barrels by 0.5mm meaning new pistons, adding to the expense. Still, what were credit cards made for, after all??!! In the mean time I painted the new wheels and fitted a pair of Michelin slicks (yes, I know it still needs to be road legal but it is easy enough to change tyres over for when the spring gets here!) and got the bike back to being a rolling chassis. The newly fettled barrels arrived so I rebuilt the motor and put the whole thing back together. Three kicks was all it took to bring it back to life and a quick run up the (private) road confirmed that this was much healthier than it had ever been. A bit of dyno time with the guys from Road and Track Dyno in Aylesbury to optimise the jetting and it's making a healthy 92 BHP at the rear wheel with a broad spread of power throughout the range added to a screaming top end!
The only downside of an increase in horsepower was that it showed up how 'average' the brakes were. Even with the bigger discs increasing their leverage they still needed far too much of a pull on the lever to slow it down. Luckily, a friend of mine, Keith Higgs had the solution. He is heavily in to Forgotten era racing running a classic P&M Kawasaki and came up with a pair of Lockheed's Classic racing calipers, perfect! Even better when I asked him how much he wanted for them; "Er, nothing, you gave them me in the first place!". I tell you, my memory really isn't what it should be. Another phone call, this time to cash in a favour with Roger Allmond (recently described by Motorcycle News as Britain's Custom Bike King!) and a pair of caliper mounting brackets were made up. Problem solved!
The whole project has turned out better than I could have imagined and is, in my opinion, a better bike than any ‘genuine’ bike could ever be. Why? Because not only can you show it and polish it and spend ages looking at it but you can ride it on the road, race it, use it and enjoy it and it won’t break the bank if something wears out. £1500 for a MK8 racer’s clutch? No thanks.
Andy Peck