Suzuki Gs500e Racer

Introduction:

Beginning of last year, me and the owner of the bike decided to do a bike – redesign together, not knowing what motorcycle he’d pick and/or what it was going to look like. When someone offered him the Suzuki Gs500e for around 350 Euros, the decision was made. Buy the bike for little so you have more to spend on the rebuild is an approach, that allows more intense design realisations, obviously…! Talking about the money, the whole build was realised with quite little financial effords, if you do not count the hours spend, which is often the case if you look at bikes remodeled by privateers.
The vehicle itself was in a rather bad condition and had not run for a couple of years, but it was complete and had no major damages or shortcomings.

The pictues and this article show the state that the bike was in when it left my shop. I had the opportunity to drive it once or twice around the block, the clip – ons and the seating – hight and -position correspond quite well with each other, the speed- and rev-meters look good too. It feels quite harmonic, although there is still room for improvement.

Summary of the things that have been done:

• rear frame is a new design, tubes were bent and welded onto the factory-mainframe, armatures for the battery-box and the substructure for the rear fairing parts of it too.
• relocation of the battery and the major electrics. A new battery-box was manufactured and fitted into the new rear frame, and a secondary armature was made from sheet metal, that closes the rear-frame off towards the wheel. On top of this armature, the electric system has been fitted.
• The rear fairing was manufactured with glass fibre mats. It’s basis are CAD-surface models and a hand made model out of solid polymer. The solid polymer model was later used to layer the glass fibre ontop, which then became the rear fairing.
• Major change were made at the front end: clip-ons, a 3D-printed instrument panel that carries the indicator-, oil-pressure and Neutral-lamps as well as the speedometer and the revolution-counter.
• an aftermarket headlight is being used, originally meant to illuminate the road for Harley-Davidson Sportster users.
• The mainframe, swingarm, rims, tank and seat were yard-painted. The colors fit quite well with each other.
• the chain-tension indicators and chain-tensioners were exchanged for a design I made and hat 3D-printed. They work and look quite well and are a neat little touch, especially compared to the original sheet-metal parts.
• Consequently, a larger maintenance was done to the motor and the carburettors. Naturally, all parts were manually cleaned to support a „fancy build“ appearance.
• Countless other small things were changed and done, like the indicators, the complete wiring, thermo-resistant exhaust manifold ribbon, etc.

work execution and anecdotes:

The project was basically started by picking up the bike. In the next couple of weeks, only few things happened in the workshop, since the only things were done during that phase were stripping the vehicle of all things that were considered unnecessary and ugly. The plan to rebuild the rear frame was taken on rather quick, since interfering with the main frame means major discussion with german official authorities (state inspection) and intense documentation and „proof furnishing“, which we wanted to avoid here. To make the bike „look“ faster, my first idea was to make a clean and simple new rearframe out of square-type tube, which would have fitted to the tube type of the mainframe, and then try to fit on an Ducati Monster seat bench unit. The Clip-on handlebar setup was mandatory here. I tried to picture the first thoughts about the rebuild with some rather „quick and dirty“ sketches (Image 5). Rather quickly, the decision fell to actually design and manufacture the seating unit as well, since we wanted it to fit the design pattern of the tank.

After several attempts, the final shape was found and the rearframe designed to actually fit the planned rear-fairing. 1:1 scaled technical drawings were made to ease the tube-bending. The decision, to actually use round-pipe instead of square-type tubes fell, since 1.: the owner liked them better and secondly, because my bending apparatus mainly supports the bending of round tubes. And since the fairing (as to be seen in picture 3), has quite some round features, tube bending became mandatory too. The tubes that form the upper planar part of the rear-frame were fitted onto the mainframe, after the factory rear-frame had been cut off. The planar part had first been tack-welded on a even table. Afterwards, the lower tubular support