Ujms Rule!
UJMS RULE!
That would be Used Japanese Motorcycles, and who needs a spanking-new ZX-10R when cheap ZX-9s abound, ready to be turned into budget street-fighters?
JOHN BURNS
I NEVER ASPIRED TO GROW UP TO BE the guy with the bondoed Maverick and plaid leisure suit who can be relied on to say, "Yessir, she gets me where I'm goin, and she's paid for!" Alas, here I am.
All I can tell you is all those years as a motojournalist taught me this: It's not the motorcycle that makes riding motorcycles fun. It's the riding. For like 15 years, I'd see the photos and press releases of all the new bikes, and a few months later there they'd be in the flesh to ride, many times as focal point of some exotic, expenses-paid junket. Ducati 851, 916; Suzuki GSX-R1100, 750, 1000; Yamaha FZR 1000, YZF1000R, R1, R6 ad nauseum... After a while, you can’t help but become a little burned out. I began to wonder how tired poor Hef must be of the never-ending parade of nubiles. How bereft of hope and burdened with repetitive-motion injury must the man be? For a couple of years there I didn’t even own a bike except for my kid’s dirt machine.
Then I met a nice girl who likes motorcycles, and suddenly I needed a bike again for all the right reasons. The thrill came back. It was kind of my job to get people to buy new bikes when I was a motojournalist and it’s totally my job now as an advertising guy, but I can’t help noticing that some very basic things haven’t changed all that much in quite some time. Four cylinders, six speeds in the transmission, inverted fork, linkage-type single-shock rear end... Hello, I have seen this movie and I give it two thumbs-up-but I’m not going to pay full pop to see it again. I may also be a little cheap.
I can’t help noticing many of the other CW kids are into their Velocettes and Nortons and things, which got me thinking that the bikes I love will soon be vintage also. Why not get in on the ground floor? When I came to work at Cycle magazine, the new GSX-R1100 and FZR 1000 went snoutto-snout in the first issue I worked on. I love those things. Then again, I’m not so interested in assuming the clip-on handlebar position anymore. I’m a big fan of sit-up-straight bikes like the Buell XBs, Kawasaki Z1000, Yamaha FZ1, Triumph Speed Triple, that type of thing.
There it was. I’d go early-’90s big Japanese four-cylinder. I’d go naked and ditch the clip-ons. Mostly I’d go cheap.
Naturally there is a lot of junk out there for sale, but the few bikes worth buying were like $4000 (about two times my price range) and so well-preserved I’d have felt guilty yanking them apart. People either bought these bikes and ran them into the ground-often times literally-or loved them so much they have an inflated idea of their current worth. Finally I came upon a ’96 ZX-9R Kawasaki in San Diego on www.craigslist.org with 8000 miles and a scabbed-up fairing. Asking price $1600. Now we were speaking my lingua franca. A ZX-9 wasn’t exactly what I had in mind-a little too modern really-but frugality conquers all.
Guy selling it had an interesting sales strategy: He’d tried to sell things before when potential buyers had all flaked out, so his plan was to have everybody show up at once on a Saturday morning at 10.1 arrived at 9:45, heard the thing running smoothly on all four cylinders through its stock exhaust, and handed him 16 bills. Underneath the scratched-up bodywork, this thing looked brand-new. A 49-state bike from Minnesota, it had apparently spent most of its time in a heated garage.
Into yon truck, my pretty; your pampered days are over...
Step one was yank the fairing. Step two was drop the headlight on the driveway. Crack! Dang. Probably the most expensive part of the bike. Step three was obtain one LSL Superbike Handlebar kit from Spiegler (www.spieglerusa. com). There are cheaper ways to do it, but sometimes you actually do get what you pay for. Spiegler’s $359 kit includes a beautifully machined upper triple-clamp and all the trimmings. Lovely. Nobody mentioned the “one-use” bolts that hold the ignition lock to the stock upper clamp, and drilling them out was about a half-day pain in the butt. Then you need to plumb in the new longer brake line (included), but after that all the other controls slide right on and all the stock cables reach. Yes, of course I used the old grips.
The Spiegler handlebar transforms the ZX-9 into a veritable street-going couch, one that changes direction effortlessly yet goes easy on the old sacroiliac and prostate, and the more I get to know the bike the more confident I feel schwantzing around town in a way I would not do with a normal ZX-9.
Membership has its privileges: Fresh Dunlops from the CW stash replaced the petrified OEM Bridgestones. CRG billet bar-end mirrors are the cat’s ass, and the ZX-9 was and remains one of the smoothest-running big Fours ever, so images in the mirrors are clear and the bar-end weights I miss not a whit. (Strange that the main complaint with the previous-generation Kawi Z1000, which used the same basic engine, was vibration-just goes to show you.) And speaking of the Z1000-a bike I like(d) a lot-according to the specs posted over at the loyal opposition, an ’03 Z1000 weighs 493 pounds to my beater ZX-9’s 464. Is this progress?
Amazingly, yanking the ram-air snorkels and float-bowl pressurization tubes resulted in a bike that would barely run past 4000 rpm in any gear. The solution (found on www.kawiforums.com) was as easy as drilling a couple holes in bottom of the airbox and routing the float-bowl pressure tubes directly into it, thereby equalizing airbox and float bowl pressure.
Two sizes bigger on the slow jets in the Keihin carburetors, one shim (9 cents apiece at Ace Hardware) under each needle, and Bob’s your normally aspirated uncle. Seems to run pretty good. Dyno runs back in the day pegged the ZX-9 at around 127 horsepower, which feels about right, but this particular unit’s days of 167 mph are over. Cruising around at 80 or 100, though, is all sweetness and light.
Heck, I even took the old beast to a track day at Pahrump, not really knowing what to expect, and had a truly peak moto experience.
While the other kids are hunched over their mincing little shrunken “modern” 600s, the ZX-9 is a purple-Naugahyde Barcalounger, lacking only a remote control and a cold Schlitz on the arms as it drags its reclining footpegs around Pahrump’s fast sweepers.
Caramba! And if the heavy old blunderbuss isn’t quite so precise as the newer stuff diving into corners, the tire-spinning, scattergun exits made possible by that wide handlebar and torquey old motor more than make up for it. In fact, I got into an excellent tussle with one of the instructors riding an SV650 for a few laps and had fun hashing it out afterward:
“Yeah,” the guy says, “that SV is the wife’s bike. The shock is shot, the fork seals are leaking-in fact, I don’t know if there’s any oil left in the tubes at all. And the tires are toast and the engine needs a tuneup... but that was fun.”
“Yeah,” I reply. “That was good. I could maybe go a little faster, but my Aunt lone knitted those tires for me herself and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. There’s a nest of California condors in the airbox, which makes it a felony if I rev the engine past 5000 rpm, and my shock spring is on loan right now to the California Railroad Museum. But yeah, great ride...”
He’d just had knee surgery, of course, so I told him about my bad back and hinted that I just might broach the prostate issue if necessary, and so we called it a draw and will fight another day.
Anyway, if money is no object, then more power to you. But nothing’s more fun than blasting past an MV Agusta on a Barcalounger. I feel much more adventurous hanging it out on the track aboard a $1600 bike as opposed to a $16,000 one. Let’s face it, I am the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of motorcycles: I smash things up and let other people clean up the mess. So now I’ve got my own mess, and everybody’s happy. Sometimes my mess sleeps out front under the big tree when I’m too lazy to put it away. Sometimes it gets parked for hours in bad parts of town, and nobody thinks to steal it. I let friends borrow it and don’t much care if they scratch up the tank because they insist on carrying everything they own in their bulky-ass tankbag. The old girl showed 8000 miles after 11 years; now she’s got 4000 more in about six months.
If I’d known we were going to be in the magazine, I’d have done more. Really, I would’ve. Spiegler also sells some very nice Mig projectorbeam headlight kits, but it rubs my fur the wrong way to put $400 worth of illumination on a $1600 bike.
I’m seeing some Custom Chrome Triumph Speed Triple-looking units that could work. Someday, I may find out if there’s any oil in the fork tubes. I might even check the valves in a couple years.
In any case, this is a highly rideable machine I feel pretty dang confident setting off upon to pretty much anywhere, though I grant you it is no Velocette. But, hey, it’s paid for. And yes, it gets me where I’m going.
