This bike started it all for me

Yea ,I think I'm wrong on that..Puzzled I researched this ..without much success. I read pirelli holds claim to the very first on the 84 VFR 1000R the tires were only produced for that one specific motorcycle only.
Then it gets vague even in my old motorcycle magazines?
I think I may be confusing myself with the FZR was possibly the first hollow spoke rim at 5.5 designed specifically for @ the time ultra low profile radials? Something somewhere has stuck in my head all these years.... But obviously ..it's got a lil clouded with age...

 

Hey now...Kelly was Coast Guard...not Navy. there's a difference.

 

Yeah, I had to be over 6' tall

(only Navy and CG people will get that)

 

Must be how my dad managed to get out of the coasties without turning Ru Paulish…he’s only 5’ 8”.

 

Yeah, me too... It helps to keep some of your old bikes, and you can just go out in the garage and look...

Suzuki GSX-Rs had lots of swap-able parts from one year to the other in the early days, so I remember a few of those obscure details from those days. My '86 750 has 1100 carbs, an '89 front end and '90 wheels.

Never knew about the VFR and radial tires thing... Interesting.

 

'88 GSXR750 was the bike that had me mesmerized as a 17 year old kid. I remember driving an hour a few times to the closest Suzuki dealer to look at it and get literature. I still want one.

 

Here is one
https://reno.craigslist.org/mcy/d/carson-city-1983-gpz-550/7618738664.html

 

Thanks dude, but Ima hold out for an '81 if I can find one.

 

I totally get your feeling on this. My new son in laws father has an 82 that he's owned since new. But, it's been in a shed since about 87 and needs a major restoration. I'm helping as far as directing them where to get parts etc, but I just can't get real excited about it because it's an 82 and not an 81. If it was an 81 it would already be in my garage.

 

I was 17 and I'd been riding dirt bikes and three wheelers since I was about 8, but I never had my own bike. Then my buddy got a DT360 and we would take turns riding it. Then I asked my brother Pat about buying a used dirt bike., and he said: "You don't want a used dirt bike", so I thought "Well, there's no way I'm buying a new one" and kind of forgot about it. A couple of weeks later, Pat said he needed to get some parts for his TM400 and asked me if I wanted to go to Anderson's with him. I said "Sure!" because Anderson's was the biggest dealer in Michigan and the showroom was always packed with pretty much everything that the Japanese manufacturers had to offer, so it was cool to go and look at them all. So we get to the dealership and Pat goes in to the parts dept. and I was checking out all the dirtbikes. Pat finally comes out of the parts dept and we're standing there looking at bikes then he says "go ahead and sit on that YZ100", so I sit on it and a couple of other bikes too. Then a salesman comes over and asks what one I liked, and I said, well, the YZ100 seems to fit me best, then he says "Oh, you'd want a 125 in about a week". So him, my brother and me are talking and I'm still not understanding what's going on until the salesman finally says: "Well, who's this for?" Then my brother says: "It's for him" Of course, my jaw about hit the floor, and I'm trying very hard to keep my cool as we talked a bit more, then finally my brother says: "Well, you decide which one you want and we'll come back next week and get it." Needless to say, very little homework got done that week as I pored over brochures and read the Dirt Bike magazine 125 Shootout article about 100 times. I decided on the YZ125 and anxiously waited for my brother to bring the subject up again. He took me to the dealer and asked what the price was, then went to the bank to get the cash, and we came home with a brand new YZ125. Then I found out what a two stroke powerband was on my first ride and took my first motorcycle related trip to the ER to see if I broke anything. I bought my first streetbike in 83 (V45 Sabre), then in 85 I bought an FZ750 three months before they landed in the dealerships, and started roadracing a few months later. I've rarely been without multiple motorcycles ever since.

 

I agree with that. Something weird with the '82 and '83. They just didn't seem to have the same soul. Maybe it was due to being the first year of the Unitrak suspension, which really wasn't fully developed.

 

Dude...you have the most epic of all brothers. Count yourself unbelievably lucky.

 

I think the '81 is caught halfway between the 70's KZs and the modern stuff that started appearing on the market in 82-83. I like the 70's throwback look to it. 1981 is sort of the last year before the Japanese manuf's went berzerk (in a good way). The 82-83 was starting to become too swoopy for my preferences. If I wanted that, I'd get a 1984.

 

Man, that's a great way to explain it. The fairing was still 70's-ish, and then they got confused on the rest of it. I had an '83 GPz1100, and that was the full swoopy bodywork. Loved that bike, and was really bummed it was dead after 4 months of owning it. That's the bike I rode from Chicago to Alaska and back (in a week), and the AlCan highway just chewed it up. Then a week after I got back, I loaned the bike to a buddy and he cartwheeled it in the local ravines.

 

There's still a tire fight going on Michelin claims to be the first m/c radial but I believe Pirelli beat them to it. And I don't think that the VFR was OE with Pirelli but I remember that a Yamaha 1000 was OE with MP7 radials in 86ish?

 

Oh, I know. My brother also told me that if I didn't maintain it right, he'd take it away from me. Learning to maintain bikes, and racing them for almost 40 years has been the single biggest element of any success I've had as an engineer. And it all started with Pat buying me that bike.
Yeah, I'm blessed!

 

You're an engineer? You seem so normal....

 

My 88 FZR750RU came with those MP7... and they claimed they were the first motorcycle radial tire on the open market back then.

 

I'm not sure my coworkers think that. I installed a new Carbon M3 Max 3D printer a couple weeks ago and I took my time, had to go to Home Depot for a few fittings, etc, and I took about 5 hours till we got the first print off it. Carbon actually had a really good uncrating and setup process for this, so I realized that with a little planning and setup we could probably get a print within an hour of the delivery guy setting the crate on the floor. So I got several coworkers to team up and treat it like an endurance pit stop. (We called it the M3 Max Pit Stop Challenge) We had hookups all prepped, fittings completely prepared, and tools set out where we needed them. (I even brought my cordless impact wrench from home so we could unbolt the shipping brackets super quick.) We had the machine out of the crate, moved it to it's new home, hooked up, booted up, and pressed the start button for the first print in less than 15 minutes. The first print was completely finished 53 minutes and 17 seconds after the crate was set on the floor.
Here's the link to the time lapse video: https://www.tiktok.com/@odlortholab/video/7231540921362550062?_r=1&_t=8cCg1GlLmrC&social_sharing=v3

 

Radial tire side notes. The first few generations of radial tires weren't that great. Part of it was that engineers discovered you couldn't make a true radial front tire that worked. Slicks in the late 80s were a bias front and radial rear. So, then the ETRTO set the standard for front radials to be a cross belt radial and the tread belts at certain angles to still be considered a "radial" and then in the 90s front and rear radials were raced on.

The tire wars were even fought during magazine tire tests. Motorcyclist magazine used to do a DOT racing tire shootout every year, and the riders weren't allowed to see what tires were on the bike. In 89 I think (2 years after Pirelli bought Metzeler) the Motorcyclist shootout found the Metzeler ME1 Racing bias- ply tires were the best and the competition radials were beat, and those guys were pissed. And that started the ship the "special" tires to Motorcyclist to win the test era. But later they started to buy tires off the shelf to combat the B.S.