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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
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
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