SUZUKI CAVALCADE
While most folk of a certain age look at smaller, lighter motorbikes, Nick Adams rode in the opposite direction. He acquired one of the largest, lardiest and, as some might uncharitably say, ugliest motorcycles ever made. Why Nick, why?
While most folk of a certain age look at smaller, lighter motorbikes, Nick Adams rode in the opposite direction. He acquired one of the largest, lardiest and, as some might uncharitably say, ugliest motorcycles ever made. Why Nick, why?
Roll forward and take a bow, Suzuki Cavalcade. Hustle your 34 year-old, chrome laden, 870lb (62 stone!) mass over this way so we can take a good look at you. Don’t worry about that scratching noise; it’s just your twin radio masts grazing the garage ceiling. Ignore that unkind heckling from the back row. You may not be a contender for the Banbury Run or drool the contents of your sump across the garage floor in the timehonoured fashion but, as far as I’m concerned and despite your relative youth, you deserve a place in the pantheon of classics and some space in my garage.
Indulge me for a moment and I’ll explain. Ever since I’d sold my Suzuki Burgman 650 scooter to pay for engine and gearbox repairs to my Moto Guzzi Eldorado, I’d been regretting it. The Burgman had been spectacularly good for two-up touring and I’d been on the lookout for a replacement ever since. None of my Guzzis fit the bill. We are full-sized people. For two-up comfort and the distance we ride, a bike needed a big, stepped seat so Christine didn’t have to look at the back of my head, plenty of luggage space for camping gear, enough power to be comfortable at motorway speeds, and it had to be cheap.
Another Burgman was certainly a possibility, but increasingly I found myself attracted to the big, lazy touring rigs from the 1980s; bikes like the Yamaha Venture Royale, the Honda Goldwing Aspencade and the Kawasaki Voyager. The fact that bikes of this vintage also happened to be right at the bottom of the price curve didn’t hurt.
I soon discounted the Hondas. Although they were plentiful, the ones available were either completely worn out or absurdly expensive, and anyway, they did little for me – too common, too ordinary. The inline engines of the Kawasakis didn’t interest me much either, and any Venture I pursued turned out to be wretched or sold already. Then the Suzuki Cavalcade turned up.
I vaguely knew that Suzuki had briefly entered the luxury touring barge fray in the mid-80s but I’d never seen one in the flesh. A quick search suggested that even though they
had only been imported in small numbers (700 in Canada, 7500 in the US, a handful elsewhere), the consensus was that they were reliable, comfortable and massively overbuilt, with the largest displacement engine (1360cc 16-valve dohc V4) and the highest purchase price of all the big cruisers of the time. It took Suzuki only four years to realise it wasn’t going to beat Honda in the Goldwing stakes and pull out of the competition. Considering the quality and features they built into these Cavalcades, my guess is they were losing money on every one. It was an orphan, an ugly duckling, a monstrous tacky oddball – so of course, I was smitten.
The first owner had meticulously maintained and lavishly cleaned it. I doubt whether it had ever seen rain. I bought it from its second owner who’d promptly failed his riding test and parked the bike without putting any significant miles on it. The odometer showed just over 38,700km – less than a thousand miles a year since it left the factory, yet the carbs weren’t gummy, nothing was rusty and everything seemed to work.
It’s a reasonable expectation that any 34 year-old motorbike is going to have its share of issues, and since I was feeding close to the bottom of the barrel, I wasn’t expecting perfection. Incredibly, the list of horrors I encountered was minuscule. There’s a small lever to the right of the passenger seat. This connects by cable to a spring-loaded rail which allows the top box and passenger seat back to move fore and aft. The lever is broken but the top box can still be moved by reaching underneath and activating the rail by hand. There should be a vanity mirror built in to the top box. The little plastic legs on the mirror mount have failed. I won’t be bothering to fix that.
Initially the battery fluid level light was staying on (yes, it has one of those). Through the knowledge of the Worldwide Suzuki Cavalcade Owners Club (FB), I was able to send a query and got the response that the green wire at the battery should go to the positive terminal. The previous owner had attached it to the NEG terminal in error. And that’s it. Everything else: the radio / CB / intercom system, the cruise control, the self-levelling suspension, the pneumatic passenger seat pad control: all work
exactly as the manufacturer intended.
Starting is simple. Pull the choke lever open, pull in the self-adjusting hydraulic clutch, turn the key and the dash displays a very quick, basic systems check. There are no fuel taps to fuss with or carbs to tickle. The big V4 starts instantly on the button, the hydraulic valve adjusters do their work and the engine settles into a fast idle. Within a few moments you can close the lever, clunk into first gear, and roll away.
Because of its weight, at first the Cavalcade feels a little ponderous, and in truth, low speed turns are best taken with care. Once moving though, most of that weight disappears. Make no mistake, you still know you are on a very large motorcycle with acres of dashboard and fairing ahead of you, but the wide handlebars and the neutral ‘standard’ riding position feel normal and the bike feels controllable.
As one would expect from a big tourer, it’s smooth and effortless on the highway. There is never a sense that the engine is ever working hard and the 180-degree crank produces a pleasing feeling – enough that you know there’s an engine down there somewhere, even if it’s not immediately obvious where. Rolling the Suzuki on in any gear produces an intoxicating, drama-free increase in forward speed and a healthy, muted roar. Add a passenger and there is no noticeable difference in performance. It reminds me of the 1960 six litre V8 Dodge Polara I had for a while. Its lazy motor barely breaks a sweat, even when asked to hustle.
Bikes like these were never designed for twisty roads, traffic congestion or filtering. At 43 inches across the mirrors you’re not going to be wiggling your way between the cars to the head of the line. They are about as suitable to tiny British back roads as the aforementioned Polara. They were designed for crossing continents; for saddling up in the morning and only stopping when the fuel tank is getting empty and the rider’s stomach is rumbling. Then doing it all over again, day after day, after day.
With such a mass underway and a 66” wheelbase, not surprisingly, it’s not exactly what you might call ‘flickable’. When I first started riding it I did find that it was a bit of a handful. Perhaps I was being too timid. I expected it to flop into the corners and thought I’d have to fight it. As the miles have accumulated I have grown accustomed to the beast and now throw it around like a lightweight.
OK, that may be a slight exaggeration, but now I just ride it and am only conscious of its considerable mass during slow speed manoeuvres. It’s not a bike for beginners perhaps, but it is entirely manageable once you’ve grown accustomed to its weight and surprisingly easy to ride smoothly. Indeed, with its rubber mounted engine and shaft drive, smoothness is the primary defining characteristic.
Once rolling, those fat tyres, the soft pneumatic suspension and all that weight soak up road irregularities like an old Armstrong Siddeley. It really is easy to
cover massive distances with virtually no effort. Shortly after I got it I rode a 300 mile loop on a day when the thermometer struggled to reach double-digits Celsius. The huge windscreen and wide bodywork did such a good job of keeping me out of the wind that I was only slightly chilled by the time I got home, and I was entirely free of the stiffness and discomfort that can accompany a long ride.
Given the high specifications of the bike, I was expecting linked brakes as both of its main competitors – the Yamaha Venture and the Honda Goldwing – offered these systems by the mid-1980s. Even without them, the Cavalcade’s hydraulic triple discs (dual 11inch front; single 11.8-inch rear) do a fine job of slowing the beast. They need to be good too. Add a couple of human-sized individuals and all their gear, and those brakes are slowing almost half a ton.
It’s a big bike (did I mention that already?) that seems custom made for someone my size. The seat height is 31.8” yet I can easily flatfoot it, and the rubber-mounted footpegs are exactly where they should be, directly below my knees. Those Suzuki folks thought of everything – even the footpegs are adjustable to three positions – heck, even the passenger footboards are rubber mounted and have two positions.
You might think that getting such a monster on to its centrestand would be virtually impossible, but once again Suzuki’s clever engineers thoroughly thought it out. The stand has a robust, foldout lever: simply flick it out with your toe, stand on it while holding one of the passenger grab bars, and press down. Voila: the bike rolls backwards and without much effort, the rear wheel is off the ground.
After 34 years, thousands of Cavalcades in use and countless owner miles, it’s a reasonable expectation that any fundamental reliability problems with the big Suzuki have already reared their heads and become common knowledge. Fortunately problems have been relatively few. Some people experienced issues with the cast aluminium fork brace, which has been known to crack at the mounting bolts. Since I knew that my Cavalcade would be spending time heavily loaded, I opted to be proactive and bought and installed a new, beefy billet brace, supplied at very reasonable cost by Cademaster Tracy at Palomino Manufacturing in Kansas. It fit like a glove.
There is also a plug in the secondary drive (the bevel gears which transmit
power from the gearbox to the drive shaft) which, if it’s not doing its job properly, can allow gear oil to flow from the secondary drive into the drive shaft tunnel. Obviously evacuating the gear oil from the drive isn’t a good plan and rear end lockups have been known to occur once it runs dry. There is a replacement plug available, but since it’s likely that this has already been done (most have), and with no desire to be delving into workings of the secondary drive, I’ll just be checking the fluid levels regularly. Other than that, they seem fairly indestructible. Stators, fuel pumps and water pumps will die, but replacements are readily available and easy to change.
I’ve added some 5000 miles to the clock
and, with one noticeable exception, the Cavalcade is living up to the Japanese motorcycle reputation of reliability and ease of use. This is a good thing. Any look behind the panels reveals a multitude of wires, tubes, switches and pumps which do all kinds of complicated things I don’t understand. This is not a bike I’ll be taking out of cell phone range into the Canadian wilds. Despite the comprehensive toolkit, roadside fixes are almost certainly out of the question. I wouldn’t have a clue where to start.
Niggles? When I first got the bike, sometimes a press on the starter button was greeted with silence. It’s a known issue caused by a sub-standard clutch switch. On a recent three-day, 1300 mile spin up to northern Ontario, the starting gradually became more erratic until the darn bike wouldn’t start at all. I took both the clutch and starter switch apart and cleaned them to no avail. Let me tell you, bump-starting a fully loaded behemoth like this isn’t an everyday pleasure, but it started willingly enough with a bump and I was able to ride home. Fortunately, there is a permanent fix with a high quality switch that uses hydraulic pressure from the clutch to open the electrical feed to the starter. I have one on order. It should be here soon.
The top of the windscreen was right across my line of sight. I adjusted it down half an inch or so but I could still do with trimming an inch off the screen. And it’s a heavy bike – perhaps I mentioned that? – so moving it around in the garage could be tricky. I never thought the day would come when my Guzzi Eldorado would feel like a lightweight, but compared to the Cavalcade it’s lithe, light and sporty. The old girl doesn’t need to worry though, I won’t be consigning her to the cobwebs any time soon.
Legend has it that Suzuki spent a lot of time researching the requirements of the long distance touring crowd while developing the Cavalcade and poured a huge amount of effort into the project, only to be beaten out at the showroom. This is a genuine shame as the engine is an absolute gem, with huge amounts of usable, smooth power and a surprising amount of character.
I’ll willingly concede that the Suzuki Cavalcade isn’t really very old and its styling and dimensions are... unconstrained. It is the epitome of the unbridled excess of the 80s and is very much a product of its age. The styling is so completely, excessively 1980, right down to the CB radio, the cruise control, the absurd amount of chrome and the dirty-blonde and brown paintwork of which, against my better judgement, I’ve become absurdly fond. As my wife pointed out, the only thing that would have improved the factory paint job would have been if the brown panels had been fake woodgrain. I hope she was joking.
While it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, as a two-up, long-distance tourer it excels. On longer rides Chris has had to battle falling asleep – the passenger accommodation is so comfortable. While it wouldn’t be the best choice to muscle out of the garage for a quick nip down to the shops or a halfan-hour spin to the local pub, if you have a continent to cross, a passenger to haul, and want to arrive fresh and unflustered, this may be the perfect bike to choose. That low mileage, well-maintained, massive touring bikes of this vintage are also ridiculously cheap, is simply the icing on the cake.