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DR800: Desert Racer? Dakar Replica? Dragon Rallyist? Deceased and Replaced?

25 01 10 - 21:35 For the next (and long overdue) fleet update, I'm going to jump from the first and smallest capacity bike to what was, until the start of December, the most recent arrival at wildchildHQ, and remains the largest capacity bike in the garage - the 1993 Suzuki DR800S "DR BIG".

I bought this bike on a bit of a whim almost a year ago from a chap in King's Lynn, via a certain well known internet auction site, primarily to function as a commuting hack, and as a bit of a change from riding Sarah's GPZ500S, and it turned out to be remarkable fun. Although I've always ridden all year round, previous winters had caused something of a contraction in the amount of time I spent on the bike, reducing it to the bare essentials. Now though I found myself taking the long way home, spending a couple of hours actively seeking out narrow, mud-strewn lanes. When the snow fell in February last year, it carried me to work regardless, although it did end up on its side on a patch of sheet ice, only quarter of a mile short of the office.



This wouldn't be the last time the bike ended up lying in the road. A month later I had my first real (ie more than walking pace) bike crash, locking up the front while filtering up the A52 into Nottingham, which led to me smashing the wing mirror off one car, then bouncing off the front wing of the one in front before landing in an ungainly heap in the road. I escaped with a couple of bruises, and the bike with a couple more scratches in the tank plastics - the biggest damage by far has been to my insurance premiums since, due to the third party claims.

Undeterred, and inspired by the DR Zeta works Dakar bikes of the late eighties and early nineties, I set about tweaking the DR to look and function a bit better, and to try and trim a bit off the 215kg wet weight. The work I did is detailed in the following posts:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

And then it let me down - on the way to work, a week and a half before I was due to depart for a 1500 mile round trip to the HUMM, it developed a slipping clutch, along with some nice clonking and graunching noises, and considerable difficulty in changing gear. My initial guess was that a clutch plate had disintegrated, but when I pulled the cover off they were all intact and in pretty good condition. Worryingly though, I could get hold of the clutch basket and rock it. Even more worryingly it wasn't the clutch rocking on the shaft, but the shaft rocking in the cases. I made a tentative diagnosis that the gearbox input shaft left hand bearing had collapsed, and threw the bike into a corner of the garage - I had just over a week to figure out how I was going to get to the South of France.

A hasty fork rebuild on the ZXR400 saw it pick up the slack admirably, albeit slightly less comfortably, taking me to the South of France and back, then doing the commute for the following months while I tried to wind myself up to fix the DR. I eventually (with the approach of the Dragon Rally looming in my mind) managed to take the bike apart and start to strip the engine down, but my heart wasn't really in it - I was looking at the best part or £100 for a gasket set, the input shaft bearing, probably a new clutch basket, and anything else which might have been damaged in the process, and at the end of it I'd still have a 35,000 mile engine. To do a proper refresh while it was apart would be considerably more money, but would probably be the only way I'd ever trust it a long way from home.

I started thinking about taking one of the other bikes to the Dragon, but in the end, I had a bit of a rethink of my approach to these things, the result of which being that I bought another bike last weekend which should prove to be everything that the DR800 should have been (and then some). So it's time for the 'king of thumpers' to go, an ignominious end in a pile of parts.

Or is it? There may be a reprieve from the scrapheap on the cards, albeit not in my hands. If it happens, the next chapter of the story will be for its saviour to tell, not me.