mr72's '92 project - "Renegade"

[ShowBizWolf]

Idk if anyone else is having problems viewing some of the pictures but some of 'em won't show up for me

The ones I can see, however, I like! Tbh I've never been a fan of the number plates... BUT the tail with the mesh looks nice!! Vinyl door edge for the ends/edges... what an awesome idea. I may use that some day. Quite tidy and as you said, minimal.

Also, this gal is super jealous over the larger tank you've got. Some day, that might be in my GS's future (along with the domino-effect mods that have to go along with it lol).

I think my favorite part though is how you flipped and re-used the stock inner fender. Fantastic

[mr72]

Vinyl door edge for the ends/edges... what an awesome idea.

Stole that idea from the Jeep folks. They cut the abs fender flares on Jeep JKs (like mine) and finish the edges with the same vinyl door edge protector. I bought about 36 ft of it for about $9 on Amazon.

Also, this gal is super jealous over the larger tank you've got.

That turns out to have been a real winning idea. Funny thing the late model tanks are more abundant and cheaper. I think the old E bikes look better overall but the late tank looks better and of course holds more fuel.

I think my favorite part though is how you flipped and re-used the stock inner fender. Fantastic

Again I stole that idea, this time from an Aussie YouTuber who did the same when doing his own seat and tail mod.

All in all I'm thrilled with the new look of the bike but I am considering removing the numbers. We'll see how they look in a couple of weeks.

Next up is new paint for the engine. If I'm keeping this bike for the long haul, it's going to need powder coating on the wheels and a new rear tire before too long. And 0.80kg-mm springs.

[qcbaker]

Bike looks great man, love the mesh tail. Number plate is cool too. Any reason you picked 9?

[mr72]

There's a 9 on one side and a 2 on the other. I will probably order smaller numbers and change them both to 92. Of course the bike's a '92 model but also that's the year I was married.

[jpfeiffer14]

OK, well it's done!

Let's see... what's interesting about this?

I made the number plates from an ABS plastic document box that I had laying around. I drew up the oval that's 7" x 8.55" on Word and printed it, then used 3M Super 77 to glue the printout to the plastic panel and cut it out with a jigsaw. Painted it with Rustoleum silver paint I had laying around and then put the vinyl door edge protector over it. Test fit the spot and drilled and tapped holes with an M5 tap and mounted it up. It has a 9 on one side and a 2 on the other.

The mesh part went pretty easy. I basically held it in the spot I wanted it and marked my cuts with a silver sharpee. Cut it with snips and bent/shaped/cut/trimmed/etc until it was the shape I wanted and then hooked it up. It's attached under the seat with zip ties and I used a 1.75" long piece of tubing as a spacer and used the nerf bar mounts on the frame with a 40mm M8 bolt on each side to hold it on.

IDK what the fashion of this is, but I really dig the look of the bike like this. I like the fact that the tall pointy tail end is gone and it has much more of a super-naked look to the rear of the bike. There is no painted side panels or fairings except the number plates f you want to count that. Minimalist. I like it a lot. And I am glad I could make this work with the stock seat.

Apologies for the messy garage pics. It's just where the bike's at.

man i wanna make my 95 like that with the mesh. what kind did you use?

[mr72]

This is the material I used.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Amerimax-Home-Products-Metal-Black-Lock-in-Gutter-Guard-6360/205207064

I think. Black powder coated expanded steel mesh about 20 ga in 8 inch by 3 ft pieces. Garage fab hacker's dream material. Would also work great for making up fiberglass parts by overlaying fiberglass on the mesh. Easily formed with a rubber mallet and blocks of 2x4.

Fwiw I ordered semi gloss black engine enamel and titanium header wrap. It's on for the weekend!

[jpfeiffer14]

this is exactly what i've been looking for
do you think they make it in 18 gauge?

[mr72]

I'm guessing the gauge, didn't measure and it is not really comparable to sheet metal anyway. If you want something more specific then you'll be ordering $100 worth of unfinished expanded metal from a sheet metal shop. Finding this stuff at home Depot was a pleasant surprise.

Sent from my SHIELD Tablet K1 using Tapatalk

[jpfeiffer14]

well, if it works it works. I'll pick some up when I have the chance and let you know how it goes

[mr72]

Some more/better pictures:







Engine case & cylinder paint plus Ti header wrap coming this weekend. Going to look nice!

[cbrfxr67]

I like it alot better when you see the bike overall!  Can't wait to see you finish it up!

[mr72]

Here she is with the header wrap and fresh engine paint:



I trimmed down the rubber foot peg covers about 1/2" to give me just a bit more leg room and adjusted the brake lever to match.

To-do list:
- new brake pads front & rear
    probably doesn't NEED them but I should check it out anyway. Might change the brake fluid while I'm in there
- new springs for the fork
    my cut-down springs work ok but I think the bike would be better if the fork was more firm
- thoroughly clean and consider refinishing triple tree, dash, and fork legs
    only part of the bike that doesn't look pretty clean and fresh
- replace the fork brace with a beefy one
    this just seems like an unnecessary expense but the fact is my bolts holding the one I have on there are rusting and the new fork brace is worth it since it comes with bolts!
- add a "third brake light" along the rear edge of the "rack" (really the top-box base)

There's actually not anything the bike NEEDS right now, which is pretty awesome. It just needs the weather to be better so I can ride. 100F is pretty miserable.

[mr72]

the @#$%&*)! tank bracket bolts fell out again. gonna loctite those bad boys in next time, once I go buy more hardware.

what a crummy design!

it's too hot to ride most of the time.

[mr72]

Went out to ride yesterday and found the tail light was flickering when I started it and then went out completely within a few seconds. Brake light was also not working.

I turned it off, pulled the seat, and found the main ground wire coming from the reg/rect DC side to the battery was melted and disintegrated.

Went out to replace that, found the black wire from the reg/rect that is on the far RH side (outside AC wire) coming from the stator was completely melted along its length and open circuit under the insulation at about 1cm from the reg/rect body. Awesome. Also my bullet connector that I had put on that wire to replace the previously melted down reg/rect connector was completely melted and gone. The bullet connector that happened to be sitting next to that one was also melted.

Something very wrong with this design if the connectors melt down like this and the wiring melts.

Something very wrong if the ground wire is melting.

Anyway, I still have to finish the reg/rect. wire replacement, have to go get more parts (more bullet connectors, some heat-shrink tubing) to finish and then get it back together. Going to go back to using the battery tender basically all the time to reduce the charge current and see if that helps reduce heat in these wires.

As usual I am trying to talk myself out of spending another couple of hundred bucks on repairs (later model MOSFET reg/rect etc.) on what was originally a $900 motorcycle that now has turned into $2500+ in expenditures to keep it running. Kind of wish I had all of my money back from this and had bought something else entirely to start with. But of course the bike is kind of worthless without these repairs so at least I have to fix the wiring and then hope that it doesn't melt again. What an amazingly crappy design, and not unique to this bike, but common across manufacturers, every MC company has issues with melting reg/rect wiring up until the mid 2000s.

So, when I go fix this and get everything working again by the end of this weekend, I'll again seriously consider whether I should ride it straight over to the dealer and trade it for something else as a father's day gift to myself.

smh.

really getting sick of this nickel and dime business on this bike.

[Endopotential]

really getting sick of this nickel and dime business on this bike.

Sorry for your ongoing headaches Josh.

But c'mon, you know you love these gremlins.  Without them, how else are we going to keep you on this forum?   

[mr72]

Yeah well I fixed it today and made peace with it again. I am probably kidding myself to think an Italian motorcycle is going to be any more reliable.

Anyway, excuse the outburst. Had a bad repair day.

<edit>

Well I went and rode it yesterday just for a quick errand since it's so flippin' hot. I was paranoid that the new wiring was going to catch fire the whole time. After the last stop it felt like it didn't want to crank and it made me question my wiring thinking maybe it wasn't charging the battery. It's in my head. Put it on the battery tender this morning and for the first time ever it said "Charging" and not "Full". But that only lasted about 1 minute and then it went to "Full".

So, it's probably good to go.

Mystifies me why the wire from the reg/rect to the stator would be melted, and believe me this thing was completely melted and the wires themselves toast, but the wire from the connector to the stator itself was fine. That reg/rect wire must have been corroded between the strands. ?

Also a big mystery why that ground wire melted down, the black/white wire from the reg/rect to the battery. This was not melted just a few weeks ago when I had the whole thing apart doing the sides and tail restyling.

My guess...

Back a year ago or whenever I discovered the melted connector at the reg/rect to the little pigtail wire (connector one side, bullets other side) and eliminated that pigtail wire etc., my guess is the black wire from the reg/rect to the stator was already going bad but it was buried inside the vinyl sleeve so I couldn't see it. I think the heat sink connection may be inefficient to the degree that it sinks some heat through the diodes and back into the wiring so it likely melted the one wire because of some accident of (or intentional) circuit layout wherein that one wire gets more heat than the other four. Again, guessing on the construction of a potted part. What seems apparent is that somehow when this wire melted and went open (and it was open!), too much shunt current was made to flow down the ground wire since that path was open, causing the ground wire between the reg/rect connector and the battery to overload and melt.

One thing I noted is that solder was wicked up until the bad wire's strands up to about 1cm outside the body of the reg/rect. While this made it easy to solder a new wire on, it does make me really leery of how it got that way. Whatever solder made it that far into the wire belongs somewhere else and at the very least this will result in a cold solder joint inside the reg/rect which will run very hot, could be part of the root cause of the entire problem.

I want to get to the bottom of this because it's unlikely that I fixed the underlying problem unless it is that a) the design is marginal and b) due to age and marginal design one wire went south causing a cascade of problems.

In the end this all tells me that I no longer trust the regulator-rectifier. I should completely chunk the old shunt regulator and replace it with a more modern MOSFET part that does not have this overheating tendency. I could at the same time build up much better wiring. Truth be told I really should build an entirely new wiring harness for this motorcycle since it has numerous iffy connections and bad modifications from the previous owner... which again all whispers in my ear to just replace the entire bike.

[mr72]

Well the worry finally did me in and I ordered a used '07-08 Kawasaki ZX6R regulator rectifier. This is a MOSFET unit that shouldn't have this crazy heating problem.



The reason I picked this unit in particular is because it has wiring pigtails, which will be much easier and cheaper to work with than the other Shindengen FH0xx units that have plugs mounted to the body, like this:



With the plug-on-body type, you are basically forced to chop off the connectors on the GS and put a mating connector that will plug into the OEM plugs. I'm sure there's nothing wrong with doing it this way and it would look good and be a long-lasting clean installation but it does double the cost of the mod.

With the pigtail-type, the plan is to lop off the OEM plugs and put bullet connectors on the stator wires and 1/4" spades on the DC out wires. This will mate with what I already have on my bike.

$17 was more in line with what I was ready to spend on mods to fix this. Hopefully no more melted plugs or wires from the reg/rect.

BTW pretty good information over on the Super Hawk forum:
https://www.superhawkforum.com/forums/knowledge-base-40/mosfet-regulator-rectifiers-why-how-25117/

[ajensen]

Cool--well, cooler than the stock. Keep us posted. I may need to make this mod.

[mr72]

Got started on the mod this morning, and as usual I ran into the need to clean up more wiring than just what I was working on, and a lack of connectors on hand, so I got stalled. Once I had a chance to pick up the missing parts, I came home and fixed it up quickly.

Looks like the wiring on this is:

connector 1: 3 black wires -> stator ... 99% sure it doesn't matter which connects to which. I just chopped the original connector off and crimped bullet connectors on and connect to the GS's stator bullet connectors directly (I had already removed the intermediate wire)

connector 2:
black/blue -> +12V ... well actually +14.6V charging voltage.
black/white -> ground
black small wire -> not used/don't connect.
In my case I chopped off the original connector used 1/4" fast-on ("spade") connectors for the power and ground wires rather than the OEM melted Suzuki connector. I had to do a bunch of other ground rewiring while I was in there.

I also chopped off my negative battery terminal because it's old and needed to be replaced plus it would be much easier to connect a big fat ground wire from here to go to the reg/rect. I found crimp-type battery lugs at the local auto parts / "outdoor power" place that is my new favorite parts store.

The new reg/rect is physically larger than the one it replaces, and the mounting holes are further apart by about 10mm. I mounted it with only one bolt and used a jam nut to make sure it doesn't come loose, but this is not ideal.

The wires from the stock reg/rect (from a 2007) were about 16AWG for the DC wires and 18AWG for the stator wires, which is why I think they tended to melt down. The wires from the new one are 14AWG for the stator and 10AWG (!) for the DC wires. Those will not melt!

Once I got it all together I left the power/ground from the R/R disconnected and started the bike so I could test the voltage from the new reg/rect. In open circuit it made about 15.5-15.6V with the bike idling which seemed kind of alarming but there has to be some kind of shunt path for the regulator to work so I turned it off, connected the +/- and fired it back up gingerly to verify the charge voltage at the battery terminals. It's rock solid 14.6V across the entire rev range from 1100 rpm idle on up to 6K which is as far as I tested in my garage.

For about $10 worth of wire and connectors and $17 for the used-good Kawasaki part, I'm calling this a huge success. Time will tell if it lasts and keeps charging the battery correctly but the multimeter tells me this is brilliant. After running for 4-5 minutes it was cool to the touch. This is going to be a huge improvement. I'm not 100% thrilled with the mounting bracket situation and I'm also not 100% thrilled with the current ground wiring but I didn't have a weekend to spend coming up with something better. In the long run I think it would be best to relocate this reg/rect to somewhere under the seat since it won't run nearly as hot as the original, so I'll figure that out at some later date.

[ajensen]

Thanks for the complete coverage of the modification. Mine may be next.