Vintage Thing No. 154 - Suzuki X7

If you ride a white bike, people will mistake you for a highway cop - unless it's an X7

I have often wondered why I should like the Suzuki X7 as much as I do. It defies logic. There are better bikes. There are more sophisticated bikes that are also more reliable. At 1.87m tall, I sit rather tall in the saddle for an X7. In fact, I look ridiculous on one.

It doesn't take me much thought to justify my enthusiasm. In 1979, when I was 16,  the Suzuki GT250X7, to give it its proper title, was the fastest of the learner legal 250s. It was the first ton-up Suzy 250 when it was introduced in 1978. It wailed beautifully and spawned a host of desirable after market goodies such as clip-ons, rear sets and spanshions.

Part of the X7s reputation was established in the motorcycling press. There were all manner of tuning articles and the most famous were the 250 shoot out series in Motorcycle Mechanics and the development of Brian Crichton's bike in The Biker.

The X7 didn't reign for long as the ultimate 250. The Yamaha RD250LC stole its crown in 1980. This was a road going TZ race bike complete with water cooling. There was also a bigger brother of 347cc, which was even more desirable but also over shadowed by bigger bikes once you had passed your test. Then the 250 learner law changed. Learners were restricted to 125s and the market for 250s rapidly waned.

Instead of stepping from a 250 to a GS1000 after your test, it was a 125 to a Katana.

Ironically this made the X7 even more desirable to me. It was cheaper and even more attainable. The leader of the pack was now the underdog. However, most examples had been subjected to the special sort of abuse that only learner riders could mete out. They regarded such machinery as a stepping stone to bigger bikes and not something to keep.

What was disposable has now become desirable. 

I was 32 when I at last acquired my first X7. In fact, I bought a pair - one for the two halves of my life, neatly divided into pre-X7 and post-X7.  

They turned up in Cubert near Newquay so there may be some connection with the terrible - whisper it! - Cubert Road Rats, The Cubert Road Rats may have had their origins in the name of a Newquay Tretherras school teacher. His initials of CRR were incorporated in the form names in our year and the Cubert Road Rats flowered briefly and faded just as quickly - too fast to live but too young to die.  

Neither of these X7s had a Cornish registration number but one was XEN and the other was ARR. As both were on a T plate I had Zen and Art! Forget about motorcycle maintenance, we're going to go motorcycle tuning!

Theoretically, purple and yellow are complementary colours. This bike still ran, albeit badly, and had a powder coated frame.

Zen had poorly applied metallic purple with yellow wheels. Art had been resprayed white but was originally blue. Or red. It had probably been red, white and blue at different times in its career.

When I applied for registration documents the DVLA replied that one of them had been scrapped. No matter - after I said I was going to restore it they still provided a V5. Happy days.

A not so happy discovery was that one of the engines in these bikes and suffered such a catastrophic big end failure that the sloppy rod had been hitting the inside of the crankcase! 

I can't imagine what sort of noise this must have made or how anyone could have run an engine in this condition but a number of X7 enthusiasts have told me that this was not uncommon. The bikes would still run so what was the problem? If loud pipes save lives, noisy bottom ends must help, too.

That cut down seat was just uncomfortable. The previous owner must have been tiny (and possibly got the ton out of this bike)

Since purchase there has been a long drawn out restoration process, so long it hasn't finished yet. One bike now constitutes all the best parts of that original two. Over the years, I've had the sense of harvesting parts and spares that were likely to be unavailable in the future. I picked up a couple of engines along the way. One came from a bike breakers in Camborne that lay behind Fore Street in an ancient workshop on an unmade road. It's probably somebody's holiday home now or an Air B & B.

I had an aspiration to mimic the Suzuki X14 that Motorcycle Mechanics magazine once featured. This was an in-line 500 made up of two X7 engines joined together and driving through an X7 gearbox in an X7 frame. I suspect the gearbox and frame wilted under the onslaught of all that reed valve power. It still intrigues me, though, as this powerplant configuration was never offered to the public for the road.

I have had a set of forks straightened, plated, reground and polished before I reassembled them with new seals and wheel bearings. I have overhauled the brakes and had the bottom end rebuilt with new conrod kits and seals.

The start of an interesting project

More recently, I bought another X7 as a rolling chassis with a monoshock conversion. That came from a village near Grimsby and the vendor initially took me for a time waster when he learned I was from Cornwall. However, I combined the journey with a book around sunny Lincolnshire and a visit to the LVVS museum. He told me, "Bring lots of cash I have the rest of it here!" I came home with, among other things, another power unit and a couple of boxes of carbs and tanks. That engine had been taken out to accept TS125 pistons for the legendary big bore conversion. That was another feature of that era - the bragging rights at the bar, whether it was for Fizzies at 16 or X7s at 17.  

Anyone "thinking of getting a bigger bike" loved big bore kits and tuning parts until that dream was realised.

Standard bikes had a square 54 x 54mm engine of 247cc. After some problems with points on the earlier and physically larger GT250s, the X7s had PEI electronic ignition. This stood for Pointless Electronic Ignition (!) but after 10 years use this system could still fail. Regular owners often carried another working ignition module, just in case. 

The X7s performance was partly due to its size and lightweight (160kgs wet). Its handling was a bit skittish and a steering damper is regarded mandatory by many who've ridden them for any length of time.  

The other aid to its reputation was the state of the art two-stroke twin with reed valve induction and pump monitored lubrication. Claimed output was 30 bhp @ 8000rpm (22.4 kW) and 27.5Nm of torque. With a six speed box, a tail wind and a shrimp of a rider 100 mph may have come up on the clock. 

The white one didn't look any better from the other side. Rust had perforated the swing arm. 

For the rest of us normally sized mortals, the front wheel pawed the air in a statement of intent. Snapping the throttle open in a corner was asking for trouble especially if an enthusiastic yoof had taken some files to the ports in the piston and barrel. 

That was another appeal to the X7. Extra power was available with a little effort. Egged on by magazine articles, anyone with a set of rat tail files could go street racing. Obviously this assumed a knowledge greater than the technical department at Suzuki but without the corporate compromises of a mass manufacturer, amateurs could wring more power out of the X7, albeit at the expense of tractability.

Those big bore kits may be responsible for my long term obsession with bore and stroke and engine capacities. TS125 slugs theoretically gave 257cc and 275cc and 280cc kits were offered in the contemporary press. There's no substitute for cubes. 

Some people hate two strokes but I love 'em. I like the theoretical idea of a power stroke in every two instead of every four. I like the smell and the noise. I like the bad boy image of yore. Those kids were just me mates arsing around. That sort of thing doesn't happen any more.

I still wanna wring the neck of the two-stroke turkey and the X7's slightly gawky looks and skinny tyres make it a prime candidate.