EX500 Build

[Spizzak]

Hey all, been away for a while since my crash but I picked up an 1993 EX500 in pretty rough shape at the beginning of this summer for a project bike. I can't pay insurance right now so I decided to start some projects that would keep me busy through the riding season and thought I would document them here.

The Bike:





So that's it as I got it. It's a 1993 ex-race bike. It has an FZR600 front end and a 1986 ZX6 swingarm with an FZR600 18" rear wheel. The PO lost the ownership and the bike wasn't running when I got but it would crank. It was a bit of a mess but I ended up getting the ownership for it and started the rebuild process.

Any feedback or tips are appreciated! I'm still working on the bike so I'll still be looking for some help, but these boards have been great so far. Thanks for all the help and enjoy the pics!

Will update as things progress.

[Spizzak]

The Motor

The first thing to do was to get it running again. The bike came with a lot of spare engine parts, and I also bought another parts bike so I wouldn't be in too much trouble if something went wrong along the way.

The spark was okay, carbs I wasn't even going to try to do anything with until I got them off and cleaned them, and since it was cranking, I decided to check the compression. The right piston was okay but the left was really low, but got much better with oil so it sounded like I would be buying a ring kit.

Looks like the carbs really needed that cleaning, and apparently this is the only picture I took of the carbs. They were really gunked up though.



I decided to just go ahead and do the rings and deal with the valves after. Cyclinder head off:



Cylinder Off:



Quite a bit of corrosion on coolant system:



Little bit of cleaning reveals a piston!



Stripped bike in the rain:



On to the head:



All cleaned up:



Valves Removed:



Valve removing tool I made:



Need to lap the valves:



Need to lap the cylinder and the head while I have the valves out. I used a piece of plate glass on top of a piece of marble tile as my lapping plate.





Getting closer:


Cylinder looks good:


Put the valves back in:



Reassembling the engine:



Timing and adjusting the valves:


All done and she lives again!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6KLW6_cxUI

[MotoBini]

Awesome job! Just by looking at the before pics I thought that case is hopeless, but, it shows to tell, you just never know!

[Spizzak]

Rear Suspension

So as I mentioned earlier the bike came with a zx6 swingarm and an FZR rear wheel, but I did not trust the setup's integrity. I decided to pull it apart and redo it properly. As it turns out, it was actually pretty well done for the most part so I didn't need to do much. At least I re-greased everything.

This site is a pretty useful resource if you're looking to doing something similar: http://mfes.com/wade/ex500.html

Side-by-side of the ZX (left) and EX (2nd gen) swingarms. The ZX pivot had to be filed down a bit (already done) and was just slightly wider than the ex.




The frame is untouched thankfully


Dog bone mount points on the ZX. After seeing the stock 2nd gen dog bones I realized why the first gen one's were necessary:


Part of the reason I was questioning the quality of the swap:


A look at the pivot point and how it sits in the frame. There is actually less wiggle with the ZX swinger than the stock one and I'm satisfied with the way it fits. Uncut dog bones on their way.






On to the wheel fitment. I basically just put thing's back together the way I thought they were:





Wheel looks centered and the chain looks nice:





And here's another reason I didn't trust the original work; Busted rear master, loop-the-loop in the brake line and a rearset that's about to fall of.


A stock rearset off my extra parts bike and a nice leftover stainless steel brake line from my SV later:


It's not in the pictures but I ended up receiving the good dog bones and with those mounted, I'm fairly sure that my rear end is all sorted.

[Spizzak]

Front Suspension

With my engine running and my rear suspension concerns addressed it was time to move onto the front suspension. This turned out to be more of a pain in the arse than expected. As mentionned the bike came with an FZR front end which to be honest probably isn't much of an improvement over stock but it's what I had to work with.
Anyway, the EX500 stem was pressed/welded into the FZR triple and maybe it was just my scepticism from the dog bones but it looked really dodgy to me. In addition to that the lower triple was bent anyway so my forks were coming out at different rakes. I decided to get a stock FZR triple and try to adapt it to the EX with bearings like so:

EX Stock Bearings:
Top = 30 x 48 x 14
Bottom = 30 x 52 x 17

FZR Stock Bearings:
Top = 25 x 47 x 15
Bottom = 30 x 55 x17

New Bearings:
Top = 25 x 48 x 14
Bottom = 30 x 52 x 17

The closest top one I could find was 25x48x13 but that should be no big deal.

Here's the bike, ready for the transplant:


Original triple:


Welded stem:


Got the FZR triple, here's side-by-side. The FZR is the taller and slightly narrower one:


Got it mounted up and I have the same issue as before :S So I took the whole thing off again and what do you know, this triple is bent too


So back to ebay to get another triple. This one looks good on the flat plate! Got a shop to press the EX lower bearing onto it:


It took a fair bit of hacking with a dremel to get the old races out but I finally did it, and got the new race in:


This triple obviously sticks out a bit further:


Adapting upper bearing installed. The bearing sits very nicely on the original bearing surface which just a bit of it extending to the threads.


The adjusting nut and locking nut installed:


And here's the upper triple to top it all off. My clip-ons were a bit high in this pic so the triple is actually sitting on them instead of the locking nut but with my clip-ons lowered the upper triple sat just a tiny bit too low. When I installed the top nut and tightened it all the way to the end of the thread there was a 1mm gap between it and the triple. I found a nice 2mm washer sitting in my parts bin, and with it ontop of the locking nut I am able to properly torque the top nut now.


Finally, I wanted to take a look at this custom caliper mount going on here:


The PO seemed to have swapped out the stock dual disk setup for one absolutely massive rotor setup. My problems with this:
1. Didn't really like the adapter though it did seem pretty solid
2. I actually couldn't get the caliper off without removing the rotor because the rim interfered
3. Not sure how important it is but the wheel was designed to have the weight of the rotor on both sides... plus Dual disk looks way cooler

So I do have both the original rotors but only the one caliper. I'm going to have a look to see if I can find a stock, hopefully 4-pot caliper set off an FZR somewhere to replace this with. But until then I'll stick to this.

And with that I think my front end is sorted. I still need to rock the forks and do the string thing to see how all of this lines up. I'm really hoping that it all just worked out and looks good when I do

[Spizzak]

Custom Tail Fairing

Finally, with all the major functional and structural aspects taken care of, I thought I'd try to do something for the aesthetics of the bike. I don't mind the more "rugged" or "primitive" look of older bikes in general but to be honest the 1st gen EX is one damn ugly bike imo. The front looks much better naked, but I really wanted to address the tail in some way. So I decided to be ambitious and try my luck with modifying the tail fairing.

I had a few designs mocked up in photoshop that basically used the stock 2nd gen fairings, trimmed them a bit and added a nice solo tail cover.

I took some pics to work with in photoshop with and without the seat and fairing:






And here's the rough idea of what I wanted to chop off:



What I did was paper mached overtop of the original fairings and tried to play with the copy I made to get it to look how I wanted but it wasn't working anywhere near as well as I had hoped. With the tail trimmed, the curves didn't flow well and the fairing didn't wrap back in to the subframe, and I couldn't blend the side fairings nicely into a solo cowl.


So I decided to go another route and make something completely custom from scratch. This was quite a bit harder than what I had planned to do but this way I wasn't restricted by any of Kawi's ugly design

The method I decided to use was to make a frame out of wire mesh and build on top of that. I forgot to take pics from the beginning but basically I just grabbed my cutters and my mesh and started shaping. I tried to make as much of it as I could out of one piece but a lot of the curves were quite dificult to bend into the mesh. Here's what the solo cowl looked like with a thin layer of paper mache over it:



Had to cut the seat a bit to make that work:



A little piece added on for the side part of the fairing. You can see the wire mesh better here:



And both pieces joined together:



At this point I was pretty happy with the overall design and shape of the tail. I also learned a lot from this initial design and should've probably started from scratch at this point and redone it fixing my mistakes. Namely I would've used sheet metal for at least parts of it, and probably a softer wire mesh for other parts. I could've also put a lot more effort into making it clean and symmetrical but it's my first fibreglass project and I wasn't even sure how the whole thing would turn out and if it would even be useable so I didn't want to put too much work into getting the first run perfect.

Anyway, next I grabbed some bondo, or a LOT of bondo and started smoothing. An early stage mock-up:



And because bondo is messy and was drying very fast, here's it in the end:





I know, a lot of imperfections that are gonna show up in my final product but like I said, it was a trial run more than anything. Next, I intended to seal this piece and use it as a plug to make a mold. However in the spirit of cutting corners and because of a few other factors I ended up just making the part right from the plug. I got some advice to use duct tape covered in deodorant (same effect as vaseline but less messy and in a very convenient package) to keep my glass from sticking to it.

Started taping it up:


All ready for the fibreglass (minus the deodorant):


And a few hours of cursing and resin curing in 5 minutes because of the extreme heat later I ended up with this:


And mocked up:




Now it's still too thin, and as expected not a perfect piece but for what it was meant to be and the amount of work put into it I'm pretty pleased. I may well redo this piece later on but for now it's going to get a few more layers of glass and that's it.

Let me know what you guys think!