My brother-in-law Mike Lantz.

When I told Mike about my dream bike he said "wow, that is a sweet bike, but its really expensive and a lot of bike to start out on."
So he lead me in the direction of some sweet older four cylinder bikes. This really began to shape my taste for older motorbikes. As a result of this I have named my bike "Mike". Please don't be wierded-out Mike Lantz.

So I began to look locally for an old Honda CB550. Then one day I met a man who had a 1978 Suzuki GS550 that had been sitting in his garage for lots of years (the last inspection was 1987...whoa).
He ended up selling it to me for $150.

So I took it home, it was not running and I really didn't know if it ever would.

I took the carbs off and cleaned them.
I had a motorcycle dealer put new tires on the rims I took them. By the way, this was a big time dealership in our area and the jokers acted like they had never put tires on anything older than 2006. Whatever.

 

I then stripped everything off the frame and began to clean it. Now, up to this point I had never really ridden many motorbikes, much less worked on them, but I have a sweet manual (which came with the bike) and a meticulous mechanical understanding of "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey". I try to keep a mental picture of how I took things off and then I put them back the same way. However, if you are like me you are laughing right now knowing that memory is not always the best way to work on cars or bikes. With that said...I still have a little pile that I am trying to figure out where these things go, and the bike is all back together. Hmmm.

Here are the exhaust pipes, one cleaned, the other anxiously awaiting a cleaning. By the way, Brillo pads (with soap because the soap acts as a lubricant keeping the scratching to a minimum) works wonders for bringing back chrome.

I didn't go very deep into the engine, but I did replace a few gaskets that seemed to be leaking oil.

I started putting things back together. By the way, once I got it all back together, with a fresh battery and some new gas I tried to start it up. To no avail. I was at a loss. I found a website dedicated to these bikes and found out that I needed to rebuild the carbs again due to a step that I missed. So off came the carbs. Once they were cleaned and reinstalled Mike ran like a champ.
As of right now I am still working on fixing the charging system which is requiring me to purchase a couple more parts. However, today it passed inspection. I know, I didn't think it would either, my cars never do at first, but it did.

Alas, the mostly finished product.

It has been a fun month working on this bike. I have been riding it around town lately and loving it.
Thanks Betsy for putting up with me for all those late nights in the garage. I love you.
Thanks dad for your help with the front brake...eventhough it was really frustrating.
Thank you Kathy H. for the garage space and for not fussing about having to step over tools when you got out of your car.
Jesus, thank you for grace on this project.