XJ650 Somerset Cafe Racer Project

Hello All,

I purchased an old 81 XJ 650 a few months back and have been turning it into a cafe racer. I have been using this forum for information and ideas more and more recently and though i should put something back. It was my first effort at this sort of thing and it's still a little way off of being finished. Anyway, hopefully the picture posts work, my starting point was like this (Library pic as I was so keen to take it to pieces I didn't get any before photos).

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

Got my hands on a haynes manual (incidently, these are from Somerset, just down the road from where I grew up in sparkford), removed the fairings, removed seat, removed lights, exhaust etc pulled the engine and ended up with a rolling chassis like this

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

Stripped the chassis down, sanded off the old engine mounts, final drive box etc and got going with the primer, base coat and lacquer....

Having difficulty posting pics, don't seem to be able to compress them enough. will work it out.

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

looking good, let us know how it goes and keep updating with pics!

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

Ok, so engine out just took off the cam covers to reseal as the old gasket was cooked, had a look at the chain.

Sanded wheels by hand, primed and sprayed and lacquered in black. (I should point out at this point that in the true old cafe racer style I am on a budget and this build is mostly about having fun, learning new things and losing as much weight off the old girl as possible, whilst trying to maintain the cafe racer look. The caviat to that being that it will also be losing its aerodynamic ability by going naked. Anyways, i digress, the wheels are now shiney black. I'm thinking of putting red rim tape around them.
Tyres are new from the past owner and have only done a few kms.

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

Final drive got the liquid chrome treatment, It too is shiney, developed problems later but we'll come back to that.

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

Striped the chassis by hand, it was in remarkably good shape with minimal rust. A few untidy welds from the factory but other than that, it worked out ok. Got the first layers of primer and base coat on the front wheel fender also.

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

I will have plenty more buffing to do on the aluminium of the engine casing. But as above photo of the chassis with engine mounts i am going for a buffed steel with lacquer on top to prevent rust, did this a few months ago and it has worked out in some areas but not in others. I have also buffed and lacquered other details on the bike from the brake reservoir down to the centerstand (which i probaly won't have on the bike once work is complete, its off at the moment).

Aluminium bits like the top yolke, i have buffed and lacquered and am pleased with the results so far.

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

I will have plenty more buffing to do on the aluminium of the engine casing. But as above photo of the chassis with engine mounts i am going for a buffed steel with lacquer on top to prevent rust, did this a few months ago and it has worked out in some areas but not in others. I have also buffed and lacquered other details on the bike from the brake reservoir down to the centerstand (which i probaly won't have on the bike once work is complete, its off at the moment).

Aluminium bits like the top yolke, i have buffed and lacquered and am pleased with the results so far.

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

Next was the front brakes, I bought steel braided, hoses from Hel. Stripped down the calipers, checked the slaves, fitted new seals and then painted with high temp caliper paint.

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

Next I went to Herm at dime city cycles (Of Cafe racer US TV show fame) to get a list of parts including the following:
- Twin chrome headlamps
- Twin custom chrome mounting brackets
- rear shocks 13in chrome adjustables
- Acewell digital tachometer and speedo all in one
- 4 way synchrometer
- Straight bar 12in clip ons
- Aluminium bar ends and mirrors
- Pod filters
- Fuel petcock valve rebuild kit

I also started to fabricate a mould to make my own fibreglass seat hump and started hacking up the old seat and vinyl to customise the seat.

Whilst waiting for parts to arrive i was playing around with the battery location and attempting fit up of the old petrol tank, wiring harness etc. I fitted LED indicators and an LED tail light.
I polished the pipes up and got a couple of burly lads around to help me lift the engine back in without scratching the newly painted chassis

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

At this point I was pretty pleased that it was coming together nicely. After reading the forum extensively i had decided that i wanted to go the pod filter route but agreed with the members that thought the pod filter dramas could be avoided by keeping the intake tubes between the pods and carbs. This created a clearance issue for me with the old battery, which was temporarily slung down on the engine casing under the carbs. I was also unsure as to where the electrics were going to sit as I was sure that i wanted to go with the open chassis arrangement. I bought a chunky new earth lead to experiment with different battery locations.

SOme of my early attempts looked like this.

Before the clip-ons arrived and acewell turned up, the old dials were hanging off the front like a couple of old chrome mountains.

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

Whilst waiting more time for parts, fibreglass resin to go off and paint to dry, i cross drilled my front discs and set up to replace some of the exhaust cable ties (replacing old aluminium chunky bits for rear footpegs temporarily) with proper metal mountings, buffed and lacquered as per the other bits.

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

The day the gear turned up from DIme city cycles was a good one, lots of progress in no time!

I relocated my ignition switch to under the seat and so the acewell mounted nicely up front on a bracket that i made up to go between the old ignition screws.

This was pre yoke buffing and pre wiring in (Dramas to follow) but gives an ide of the fit up and look from both front and back.

Note the chunks of unattractive wiring hanging out front.

Cross drilled discs also back in there

Clip ons fitted and brake master cylinder stripped from black to brushed aluminium and detailed (as inspired by someone else here on the forum)

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

New shocks fitted to rear, LED tail light and rear seat hump.

The seat at this stage was just the cut down version of the original so as you can see was waaaaaay too chunky to maintain any lines on the bike.

 

Re: Somerset Cafe Racer

These are all the pics i have with me at the moment until i get home in a few weeks. It takes the project almost up until the present day. SHortly after this i started wiring in the LEDs, started the seat build proper and playing around more with the wiring configuration.

HAd some real dramas, the bike was running badly when i got it and when pulling apart the loom i could see why, relays missing, bodged wires shorting out where relays should have been, random splices, wires without end connectors etc.

Still working through this but recently i purchased a TCI from a breaker in the US after tracing poor spark on 2 and 3 back to the unit. The pick up coil tests as per haynes manual check out. I'm thinking now i will go with an aftermarket TCI.

In other news, i purchased an antigravity battery which is lithium ion and really a neat little unit. it fits up under the seat and is hidden. I haven't fired it up with the new battery yet as i'm waiting on the TCI.

 

Looks good.

 

Looks great! Where did you get the battery? Looking to relocate mine in the hump so I can keep that open look. Need a battery that can lay on it's side. A couple people on here suggested a Motobat Battery.

 

nice build, keep up the good work and keep the pics comming.
now!! from experience, i think you may need to put the clipon handlebars above the headlight brackets, especially as the footrests are in the original position, the bars are way too low to keep the footrests as forward as that,imho
it may seem fine in the garage but try sitting on it for a half hour, and your belly will be aching.
unless you're a super nimble athletic young thing, if so please accept my appologies :wink:
cheers stu

 

Thanks guys. Might not be to everyones tastes but I like how its going so far. The battery is one of these:
http://antigravitybatteries.com/?page_id=994
, if you wanted to go really small then you could probaly get away with the 4 cell. I have the 8 cell as reccommended by the manufacturer. WIll get some comparison pics when i get home in a couple of weeks and stick them on here. I have a pretty small seat hump but have left in the inverted U part of the frame and the battery sits in there easily, my only concern was clearance if i hit a large bump at speed. Plus it fits under the seat pretty nicely. I used the original plastic clamp and rubber strap, some one sided sticky foam comes with the battery to pad it out in the original box which comes in useful. It really is a neat little unit, way smaller and lighter than the original battery and not that much more expensive (Here in WA, standard new Pb or gel batteries of a decent quality go for over 100AUD). I won't sing its praises too much until i've seen how it runs on the bike but physically it works.

Other people sell them, for example dime city cycles, the dealer in aus wanter 230 AUD so it was cheaper to get one sent from the US than buy from home sadly.

 

Thanks for the advice bensalf, I am going for the agressive cafe stance for sure. I've played around with the height a bit and they are now even lower as the handlebar controls would fould the petrol tank near full lock. to have them at a decent enough angle to not be straight and fit my wrists I need them down a bit. My other option is to lower the front a couple of inches and pop them on above the top yolke, but if i do that then they will be at a similar height to the original bar clamps and i may aswell have got drag bars. Dilemmas. Its a work in progress so i will definately be adjusting the height further, the great thing about clip ons!

 

The Missus sent me a couple of pics of the bike in the car port at home. So below is the front with tidied up wires and slightly lower and more angled bars. You can see my stripped and accented Yamaha brake fluid reservoir also. The steel braided lines are in there. I may reroute the throttle cable as its a bit long poking out front there at the moment.

With all the slack in the loom, i've managed to chop out a kilo or two of redundant long bits of wire and pulled most of the connections back under the tank. Originally, these connections were made behind the headlight in the front fairing. I replaced many of the old ones with new multipins and they fit pretty nicely up under the main logitudinal chassis brace between the two coils.

The back shows my home made ribbed stitched seat, made from the old seat. its pretty tight in there now and sits down between the tank and the rear hump, unlike the chunky foam on the previous attempt. I hope my bum doesn't miss all that foam i've cut out too much.

 

Looks amazing!The brake reservoir looks good up there. Where did you get the brake lines again? Where they made for the bike or did you have to order from measurements?

 

Hi Rk,
The lines are hel steel braided with a clear PVC sheathing. They do other colours depending on what you colour scheme is. They do titanium ones if you want to splash the cash, they are twice the price.
The aussie site for them is here:
http://helperformance.com.au/catalogue/ ... e-systems/
I think the company is European and they have links to other countries on the site but that is the one I am automatically taken to due to my location.
The kit comes ready made for the XJ and can be found here:
http://helperformance.com.au/store/prod ... ts_id=4887
I think I paid 200 with delivery and a fuel petcock thrown in from an aussie motorfactor. This was the only stuff I managed to buy from home soil before searching abroad in Europe and the US.
My brakes feel great, much firmer than before. They were probably just dirty and so a flush out and rebuild of the calipers with the new Dot 3 in there and the fresh lines has really tightened them up. The pads were newish with lots of meat on them and I have the cross drilled discs in there now so should have the braking all sorted.

 

Ok,
So its been a while and I have been distracted from the project by other things but to bring it back up to date. Got the acewell hooked up and running, looks a bit like this.

Functionality has been great and its pretty cool seeing the digital RPM working in nice big numbers underneath the speed. The fuel guage is redundant for now. But i will look into getting a sender unit and hooking that up when the project is near its conclusion.

 

Next up was the seat and rear hump.

I think I covered the fibreglass job for the hump already. The seat was made from the original as i wanted to keep the hinge and locking function for the seat and helmet. As there is an empty space under the seat now then it acts as just a service panel to get to the battery and TCI as well as the regulator/rectifier.

Basically, it was a bit of a chop job. I lopped the back off, chopped the foam. Cut the vinyl into strips and inverted them to stich them back together on the missus's sewing machine. Its clearly home made and wouldn't win any shows. I intend to stitch a better border to it and re-staple it to the underside but generally I'm pretty pleased with it. The original faom pad was pretty chunky so i had to shave alot off to keep it within the lines of the seat hump.

 

And the finished product engaged on the bike. The ignition switch is next to the seat and helmet hook lock. Both still use the original key thankfully.

 

I mentioned the antigravity battery before. Its been great and is located with the original strap and hook up under the seat in a horizontal position. Due to ongoing ignition woes (More of that later), the final arrangement of the wires up there isn't sorted, so I don't have a pic yet. But here is the antigravity next to the original battery. It has a higher cold cranking rating than the original so whips the engine around nicely.

 

So,
With things back up and running and another TCI sent in from a breaker in the US, it was time to check the sync on the carbs (Bench synched during rebuild at the start when it was stripped down).
The synch up went well and it started so easily on the button, producing a fairly crisp throttle response. A surprising difference from the original TCI and 750 carbs the previous owner had on there where it barely ran at all. Almost time for a test ride.

 

The first couple of test rides around the block ended with me pushing it back to the shed. on one I blew a main fuse which was put in at below the rating, so put a 20A in there and went again. Ran out of fuel, but the pick up seemed OK. I decided it was time for a proper jaunt so went for the 2 bridges route about 1.5km away from the house and across a river on a dual carriageway. Disaster, started missing when i pulled out onto the carriageway then gave up completely when i was furthest from home. I pushed it back pretty ticked off.

This time it blew the 20A, so i replaced it.

Took the plugs out, turned it over, no spark. So went back to basics on the wiring. At this stage there is virtually nothing left of the original loom with the previous owner having removed the side stand, clutch and neutral relays from the ignition circuit. The diode block is gone as is the self cancelling indicator. The wiring setup I have used is absolute minimalist as used on this forum from other members.

After much fettling, and testing to the haynes manual, i now have a spark, just all the time. I have 3 spare TCIs now the one it was running on doesn't produce a spark either side and the one it originally came with only fires on 1 coil. The replacement ones i have fire on both coils ok but all of the time. They even fire when i turn the ignition key off so the bike won t run and backfires, top fires and sparks all the time.

Having other things in life to be getting on with I haven't had much time for it since. I had considered stripping it for parts and using them on my next project bike and selling the engine frame etc which all check out. Its probaly worth more money that way. But this would be the first vehicle ever that i haven't been able to fix. My last shot is to buy another loom and go back to basics. I'm sure that the diodes in the circuitry I have must be missing and causing a back emf when i turn the switch off.

All in all its been rather frustrating. I have a bike that i'm really pleased with sat there in the garage, but can't use it. Now that the rocket is gone, its my only bike. I bought a couple of buffing wheels and have polished the handlebar controls and engine casings to a mirror finish but thats been the only progress in the end of 2012. Hopefully 2013 will be more fruitful.

 

This the old beast as it lies now

 

Looks real NICE!!!

skillet
btw The Horse (mag) just had a write-up on those batteries...

 

For the no spark issue just check everything. I had a few of the old plug ends where the wires actually came out of the metal piece that inserted into the plugs but it looked fine from just a fast visual inspection. Also some of the wires may be corroded from the inside. If any of them are stiff to move, they need to be replaced.

A few questions of my own now. How accurate is your Acewell tach? Mine seems to me fairly accurate but I feel it could be better, I went with the wire wrapped around a plug wire method to get the signal and set the gauge at .5 revolutions per cycle. I had it on 1.0 and I think it was readying to high. What do you have yours set at?

I like the look of the white and red also, mie will be black and red with gold accents. Hopefully it stops raining and I can paint it this week.

-Chris

 

The problem now is too much spark.

Regarding the acewell, it worked as soon as i did the wrap, i went for about 20 wraps to get a good signal. Way more than the recommended 5. Had it reading pretty well with an idle of 850 to 900, it was pretty stable. Maybe mine was already in the 0.5 setting? I've been watching your build with interest. Keep up the good work.

 

like how thjis is going, keep it up!

 

HHHMMMM I've got 4 wraps on mine now... I guess I will try more!!!!!

And what do you mean to much spark? Sparking at the wrong time? I think our bikes are a wasted spark system so there will be an extra one, but if the timing of said sparks is off it will never work properly. Have you changed the timing at all, check the chains and tension.

 

Looks great! I think the 650 Seca is the best looking of the Seca line. I have one I've owned new since 82. Not sure if anyone else asked, but what did you do with the original headlight? I'd like to buy it as a replacement on mine.
Thanks.

I'll PM you too.

 

Apologies for the tardy response. I still have the original headlight if you want it. Its yours for free as a fellow forum member if you pay postage which may be a bit from WA to eastern US? do you want me to look into it?

 

I have other bits and bobs so will put a sales list together. A few project updates. It is now essentially finished and I have put about 100km on it bombing around town and visiting cafes. I have started a new project, which is also almost complete so will be selling the XJ shortly to start on the next one.
The electrical fault was a back emf related problem causing errors with the TCI, this was due to the removal of too many diodes from the circuit. It seems others have had succees with the removals of these diodes when wiring the simple circuit, but for some reason my bike was not able to run those circuits, it may be due to the wiring in of the acewell and ballasted LED indicators???
Anyway, sorted now.
An additional problem which i did not find and solve was that the carbs had their jets drilled out by a previous owner in the pilot circuit. So my 45s were actually considerably larger, this was effectively choking out the bike and coking up the plugs within a few miles, which compounded the weak spark issue. The bike runs great now we have the original jets back in there. Something to be aware of, without having a new standard jet to hold up to the light and compare it to, i would have never spotted the difference when rebuilding the carbs and checking the jets.
Finally, the bike needs a few finishing touches so i'm selling it on for the next owner to tinker with, things like polishing aluminium on rear hub, stitching seat, wheel tape both sides etc etc. I will carry on tinkering and finishing these small jobs until it sells.
I ended up taking forum advice and heightening the bars by lowering the forks through the triple tree then reattching the clip ons to the 2in of tube above. I have found this to be alot more comfortable but have lowered it a bit too much. There is a slight fouling issue if i hit a bump at speed with the front wheel cowl so i will either cut it back or heighten the tubes an inch or so.
Generally i am pretty chuffed with the outcome, i made a small aluminium box to go under the seat which now raises as a service panel to access the Li-ion battery and rectifier as well as the TCI. The wiring could no doubt be neatened but is well hidded under the tank and seat with the new fuse box. I even managed to get the old lock in there so 1 key operates the ignition barrel, chain lock, seat lock and helmet lock as it would have done on the original bike.
A few pics to follow.

 

In Le Garage before final tank and hump fitment

 

close up of engine with round casing faces polished

 

down on marine parade, cottesloe

 

Rear view by indian ocean, other side, cafe etc etc

 

helmet in original helmet hanger lock. open frame well visible

 

Last shot after my numberplate let go and then went under a truck at Freo docks. A funny lesson in not going for long test rides with some bolts done up only finger tight....

 

Somebody is gonna get a NICE lookin' scooter!!!

skillet

 

Thats actually what I'm going for next, just finished a streetfighter project and am going for a scooter, a lambretta or vespa restoration as a city runabout. Don t laugh, i think they're cool.

 

My conclusions have been. XJs are great classic bikes with lots of character. I will definately consider them for future projects and might end up with a permanent one in my garage one day. This forum has been one of the most insightful i have used, but not the easiest to navigate for 'how to' guides compared to some others. The depth of knowledge here is a true asset to any home mechanic.
Thanks to all the help from the forum. I'll post a list of gear I have left over soon.

 

Also a little disappointed i only got to 2nd gear in the posting rating. I guess I'll have to keep the account alive and get another XJ to build on that in the future.

 

The