YAMAHA FZS600 FAZER
Open the champagne! Alan Dowds’ motorcycle odyssey continues in CMM
Alan Dowds returns to CMM.
Iknow, I know. Regular readers might recall that I’m already signed up for a project bike in these here pages. Where’s the turbo ZRX Al? What have you been doing Al? It’s true. My turbocharged Eddie Lawson replica has turned into a sort of Brexity black hole. A farrage-o, if you will. I’ve taken my eye off the ball. But THE ZRX IS STILL HAPPENING! I’ve decided to double down. Like Theresa May, I’m going to keep at it, and I reckon a resolution is closer than ever.
Nothing has changed: promise. In the meantime though, I’ve only gone and got another project bike. I was on the phone to Sean Mills at Big CC Racing, tickling the turbo ZRX along a bit, and he asked if I wanted to buy a Fazer 600 for a ‘fabulous’ price. Now, I have previous with Yamaha’s natty middleweight roadster. When I started working full time as a bike
journalist, the FZS600 had just been launched, and at the end of 1998 I bought the one MCN had run as a long-termer: with my own money and everything. It was bright red, the reg number was R270 PGO (anyone recognise it? It is still MOT’D ,so she’s definitely out there) and I had a ball on it.
I later moved on to work at RIDE magazine, and ended up with another one as a long-term test bike there: a later 2000 ‘S’ model with a bigger tank and preload-adjust forks. Then, a couple of years later I was at Superbike magazine, and picked up the ultimate ‘foxeye’ model, with stainless exhausts, proper headlights and fancier dash. Back then, the Fazer 600 was one of the best bikes around. It was cheap to buy, cost pennies to run, and the Thundercatbased engine was a corker. Torquey, and with decent top-end, it kicked sand in the face of Honda’s revvy Hornet and the
rather wheezy Suzuki Bandit 600. The brakes were proper supersport kit, shared with the mighty R1. The forks had the damping of a Las Vegas motel waterbed and the headlights little better than a Victorian miner’s Davy Lamp – but the bikini fairing and spacious dual seat gave it genuine light touring skills. It was even good at wheelies. In my eyes, Yamaha’s greatest crime was to replace it when it failed Euro 2 emissions regs – with the revvy, limp, middle-of-the-road FZ-6. Duh. Fast forward 20 years, and high on late-90s nostalgia, I’m completely sold on the idea of having a Fazer again. I’ve not even seen it;
I just have Sean’s description – rattly cam-chain, high miles, a bit grubby, but all there. I agree his bargain price of £400, on the understanding that if I really, really hate it, he’ll buy it back off me again. Money is transferred electronically. I’m back in the Fazer game. A week or so later, I get myself down to Wokingham to check the new purchase out. And I’m more than pleased with what I’ve got. It’s not the best colour – the silver isn’t a patch on the red I reckon. But it is, as promised, all there. The fairing has some moderate crash damage, the black-painted mild steel header pipes are, like all the early ones, pretty rusty, and the whole bike is coated in a thick layer of shed crud. The engine cases are missing a load of paint, most of the chassis fasteners are rusty, and the tyres are ancient. On the plus side, the chain seems fairly new.
She’s a T-reg, so one of the last of the original models. I grab some jump leads and connect her up (the battery is, of course, properly dead, with what looks like a ‘2007’ fitment sticker). The dash flickers into life, revealing the mileage: 43,768. I hit the kill switch, and the fuel pump starts priming (the bike uses carbs, but the tank has a fuel pump rather than a simple gravity feed.) Dare I hit the starter? Of course I do. After about ten seconds of cranking, there’s a cough, a splutter, and she’s running. Woo! I quickly turn her off, though: there’s a definite light rattle which sounds like a cam-chain, but more pressingly, there’s a massive puddle of fuel spreading out under the bike.
A stuck needle valve seems like the obvious culprit, so a proper carb strip and clean goes to the top of my mental to-do list. I disconnect the jump leads extremely carefully – it would be properly suboptimal if I managed to set the bugger on fire moments after first seeing it. I pop a pic of the bike on social media, and a couple of folk ask what the plan is – which makes me think seriously for the first time about what I’m going to do here. I’ve learned a lesson with the ZRX, and am going to keep this project a bit simpler – get the basics sorted first, then carry out some rolling upgrades, so I can actually
ride the bike as I go along. I have access to a lot of fancy bikes in this job, but it’s still very useful indeed to have access to your own wheels. A cheap, practical, fun roadster like this will tick a lot of boxes for me right now. So – a proper clean, a strip of the carbs, and a look at the motor. A compression check on each cylinder, to see if I need to delve any further there, then a valve clearance check, and a new cam-chain (soft link to avoid a total engine strip).
There’s a chance I might get away with just a new/tweaked cam-chain tensioner though: 44k isn’t massive for these engines. We’ll see. When the engine is hopefully running in a quieter fashion I’ll do my usual must-do changes on a new bike: a new battery (maybe a lithium job), new, matched sporty tyres, brake pads and fluid, probably some new spark plugs, a coolant flush and change. And engine flush, fresh oil and filters goes without saying.
Once that’s all done, I’ll get an MOT, insure the beast and start riding. Then I can sort the longer-term jobs. The fork stanchions are pitted, though not in the swept area, but I’ll probably try and renovate or replace them anyway. I’ll deffo need an exhaust – stainless header sets are fairly cheap, it seems. A Dynojet kit in the carbs and maybe some other stage-one tuning could also feature. I can’t find a big-bore piston kit listed anywhere, sadly, but a new rear shock shouldn’t be out with the realms of possibility. Will the mighty Fazer 600 be taxed, tested and running properly before the Brexit debacle ends then? Place your bets…