I built the Suzuki GT1000…
Phil Baldwin, who built the four-cylinder Suzuki GT1000, has been involved with motorcycles for more than four decades. At 21 in the early 1970s he started as a mechanic in a bike shop in the Rochester area where he still lives, and went on to manage a Yamaha dealership, and later a car garage.
That was followed by a period as a ship engineer based in nearby Chatham. “It was really interesting,” he says. “I was in a team working for a specialist diesel engine company and we’d fly out anywhere in the world to rescue broken-down ships, mostly merchant vessels, who’s owners didn’t want to pay the cost of a tug towing them back to port. We’d sort out all sorts of repairs just to get them going, sometimes removing massive broken pistons and connecting rods from engines or, as we did once, using an auxiliary generator connected to the prop.” When we met Phil, he was furloughed from his job as a driver for a car rescue firm, but he’s been busy for many years rebuilding and modifying Suzuki GT750 triples for himself and fellow Kettle Club members, based in his tidy workshop at the bottom of the garden. Although Phil’s had other motorcycles, his favourite is the GT750, currently owning three in addition to the GT1000: the blue minter in the pictures that was first built from parts 25 years ago, a second that he uses in all weathers for going to work, and a third that belonged to his best mate in the 1970s and is stripped, waiting, as he says, “to be rebuilt for when I retire”.
All the engine and chassis hardware has added about 20kg to the weight of the bike, much of which is at the front (51.6% in fact because we measured it on some bathroom scales), so that may have had some effect on the steering. But Phil’s got used to it and is happy with the bike.
Clearly the building of the GT1000 has been a labour of love for a dyed-in-the-wool Kettle fan, with Phil facing a series of challenges on the way and overcoming them with a bewildering range of impressive skills, from professional-quality machine work, welding, paint spraying (the beauty of the pearlescent red finish brings a gasp) and to the crafting of the authentic-looking badges on the side-panels.
One really fiddly task was the adaptation of the oil-pump that supplies lubricant to each of the crank throws. An additional feed had to be fitted precisely, along with the delicate feed pipes. It didn’t go precisely to plan, because just before we were due to ride the bike one of the big-end bearings failed because one of the oil feed pipes had slipped off its union. Undaunted, Phil stripped the engine apart, rebuilt the crankshaft and had the bike back on the road within days. And he didn’t go over budget by that much.
“It cost me about £500 more than I expected,” Phil says, with most of that being for a chromeplated rear mudguard imported from a custom-bike specialist in the US to match the extra width of the rear tyre.
But that’s the kind of attention to detail which is necessary to build a special to fool the experts into thinking that the GT1000 could be a factory prototype.