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New Member with a chopped-up GS850GL cafe racer

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    New Member with a chopped-up GS850GL cafe racer

    Hey All -

    It's great to be back on this forum after a long absence! In 2005, after frustration with the cost of keeping a car in the city of Boston where I lived and worked, I decided to take my safety course and buy my first (hopefully) inexpensive bike. I found a guy selling a 1982 GS850G with a bazillion miles on it for $650, but which he said ran and drove. It did, and I drove it for a year before i decided to get fancy and start fooling with jetting the carbs. This was when I found out that the previous owner had jetted the carbs so that the bike would run with the three functioning cylinders it had. The fourth was frozen in place, and had been the entire time I'd been driving it!

    After selling that bike for parts, and leaving the world of GS-es for Suzuki cruisers, I gave up riding when my wife and i had our first child in 2016. I needed a car, and I hadn't had one for about 10 years!

    Fast forward to 2021. We live on Cape Cod, our son is happy and we're all safe from Coronavirus (for now) and I'm missing something in my life. My wife and I talk about it, and we agree i can start looking around for an inexpensive project bike.

    Of course, i knew exactly what i wanted. A *FULLY* functioning GS850.

    After weeks of searching want ads, auctions, Craigslist and others, I found someone selling a partially-restored GS850G that he'd been converting to cafe racer configuration a couple of states away. Right away, I could tell that it was in okay shape - the exhaust headers were rust-free; there was minimal pitting on the aluminum surfaces - cosmetically it looked good. Of course it wasn't running. Of course the guy who had it couldn't tell me exactly what it needed. But i had a feeling about this bike.

    So I rented a u-haul, drove 350 miles and bought it. Came back home and started pulling it apart with a friend of mine. We've got about 8 hours of work into it, a few hundred in parts (I'm DAMN lucky i have a friend who knows how to rebuild carbs).

    I was right about the mechanicals - it's in good shape.

    I'm about a week away from getting it back on the road and plan to take it to some of the shows soon. I'm delighted to be back on a bike, and even more delighted to be back on my first love, the crazy, heavy, brutal GS850. I'll post pics when we're done!

    Thanks for still being here!!!

    Jason

    #2
    Welcome back. Lived in Boston for quite a while, I miss Beantown and the Cape, love to go back and visit. Moved to central PA after our first son was born. I can appreciate your problem keeping a car in Boston. It's no fun. I don't miss having to move my car to god-knows-where for snow emergencies and street sweeping days. Do they still do the MSF course at Hanscom AFB? That's where I took it sometime around '94.
    Last edited by Rich82GS750TZ; 08-27-2021, 04:45 PM.
    Rich
    1982 GS 750TZ
    2015 Triumph Tiger 1200

    BikeCliff's / Charging System Sorted / Posting Pics
    Destroy-Rebuild 750T/ Destroy-Rebuild part deux

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      #3
      Welcome to TheGSR.

      will also welcome pictures.

      Had 850G for 14 years. Now have GK since 2005.
      GK at IndyMotoGP Suzuki Display... ... GK on GSResources Page ... ... Euro Trash Ego Machine .. ..3 mo'cykls.... update 2 mocykl


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        #4
        Welcome back.

        Originally posted by jables617 View Post
        ..., I found someone selling a partially-restored GS850G that he'd been converting to cafe racer configuration ...
        Something tells me that those two concepts can NOT be applied to the same bike.

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          #5
          I think Hanscom only does the Harley-sponsored one now, but yeah.

          Ha, my roommate and I had to move our motorcycles all the time because our landlord wouldn't let us slide them around back! Boston.

          Comment


            #6
            Okay good point. Replace "partially restored" with "partially resuscitated".

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