Part V – The Visit comes to an End – Sayonara, Hamamatsu

There was no EFE. I lapped the room again just to make sure it wasn’t hiding in a corner that I’d missed. Nope. Clearly, this was in my opinion a HUGE gap in the gathered collection. How could they not have an EFE out on show?! But so it was. ‘Suck it up, sunshine’. I am totally writing a letter.

Some interesting marketing displays
The Hayabusa – Suzuki’s Power House
70’s Suzuki Fun rides

I returned to do the circuit of exhibitions the other way around, just to get those different angles. Sometimes you get very interesting angles.

The Katana looks good from all angles.

I walked the floor, gathering extra snaps of my favourites. I was still feeling pretty euphoric just to be there. From that position, everything else is a bonus.

The GS750 was a milestone marker in Suzuki development

It came time to go. I’d been walking the top floor for an hour and a half and some other visitors were starting to arrive. Time to Exit through the Gift Shop.

Except …. well, it wasn’t really a gift shop. That would be stretching it. I had taken my credit card and as much Yen as I could stuff in my wallet and I was going to buy Stuff.

The shopping opportunity was modest. It consisted of 3 vending machines with a small range of 30 or so souvenir items from a Suzuki key ring to a katana model kit. I cleared the front desk out of change swapping my notes and brought back enough small packages to generate some smiles as well as adding to my collection.

The Suzuki Plaza Gift Shop

And there it was. With the day drawing on, I had the same long journey to do in reverse and from the cloud I was floating on, I preferred to get back to the hotel before dark. The parting shot from the overhead rail platform was almost surreal except I had a phone full of memory snap shots and bag full of goodies. I did it. I went to Hamamatsu. Get. In.

Thanks for listening, folks.

Discuss your trip to Hamamatsu here >>> https://oldskoolsuzuki.info/forums/topic/12455-that-time-i-went-to-hamamatsu/

Hamamatsu Heights – Part IV

Another spotless flight of steps led to 3rd and final floor of Suzuki motorcycle history. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this place, Suzuki Plaza. Everyone has their own idea of what Suzuki is, what they do and what that means to them. I wondered if the old boy who worked the front desk with limited English but a welcoming smile even knew that there were groups of like-minded folks gathered within oldskoolsuzuki.info still trying to better what Suzuki had intended (in our own special ways).

I had high hopes, of course that I would see all my favourites here. I wanted to see the clean, original version of stuff I have stashed around the workshop in various motorcycle shaped lumps. And here they were –

GSXR1100H Hamamatsu – Red and Black – Ding Dong
One of my favourite views …
We love the .info

I’m partial to a red and black slabby, I’ve had a couple although my current preference is blue, white and turboed.

Talking of which … how clean?!

Not the highest regarded of Suzuki’s machines, it’s a rare thing to see

There were some great .info displays and I got to dust off my anorak and top up my pub quiz knowledge.

The latest in early 80s motorcycle technology

It tickled me to see this lovely little RG. My first taste of something a little ‘sharper’ at 18 years old. I somehow over-baked a tight right and ended up in the long grass – could have been worse.

Now, I am being picky here about what I’m sharing. There was some other stuff up there from the ‘utility’ market – funny little motorised carts which had done great business for Suzuki. There was also some stuff about the introduction of water cooled engines in motorbikes but you’ll have to read about that elsewhere – it’s not for me.

I lapped the room. I had been here for 2 hours so grabbed a can from the vending machine and sat. Sat and looked. And looked. For me there were some obvious omissions but I was going to walk the room one more time.

Tune in for the final part coming soon!

Discuss Suzuki Plaza at Hamamatsu here. What’s your story? >>>> https://oldskoolsuzuki.info/forums/topic/12455-that-time-i-went-to-hamamatsu/

Hamamatsu III – The History Stuff

Being a good student, I already had some of the history of Hamamatsu down to an ‘elevator pitch’ but let’s see what I missed. The bikes were not going anywhere but I was still teasing myself with thoughts of what the top floor had in store for me. First I had to make my way through the manufacturing exhibition.

As you’d hope, there was some interactive stuff. Pulling levers to rotate a car door on a fully automated robot production line was a good one -great sounds. I knew from a little inside tip that there was another machine which would deliver me a Suzuki egg! (It had a car in it … booooo) You were walked through the casting process and got to see some models too.

Can ya tell what it is yet?

I’ve got a bit of a thing about casting since making my own ally ashtray in Big Pete’s GoP many moons back …

There was some stuff around the factory itself and the sheer scale of the site can be seen from the aerial photos taken through the years. (come on! get to the bikes already!)

Hamamatsu from the Air
Suzuki – Mission Statement

I moved up to the next floor and came pretty much face to face with The Man Who Started It All. Not the most recognisable face, sure but here he was. The man who had used his engineering skills and business acumen to redirect Suzuki from a failing loom making business, to an upstart car manufacturer closed down by the war as ‘non essential manufacturing’ , reinvented AGAIN as a motorcyle and small utility manufacturer, and onto the business that continues to thrive today. It was pretty emotional. Plus, I hadn’t really spoken to anyone all day and this guy was willing to listen a while.

The man of ingenuity – Michio Suzuki

And finally – here they spread in front of me, I CAN SEE THE BIKES! Be cool. Breathe.

Suzuki: In the beginning …

I’m still on early history trip now and am duly reminded that from day 1 the business purpose was to serve its customers. Right now there was a gap in the market for cheap and easy to maintain transport that everyone could use. Suzuki’s engineers calculated that 36cc gave sufficient output having been combined with a pedal drive and the Power Free E2 was born in the early 50s.

The handsome Diamond Free model

Development continued at pace in Hamamatsu. It was 1954 and the team were set up at the prestigious Mount Fuji hill climb – it was show time. Their win there in the 90cc class put them firmly on the manufacturer’s map. They were contenders.

As well as speed and power trials, Suzuki also wanted to demonstrate the reliability and tenacity of their new machines. A pair of brothers spent 2 years riding this ‘Diamond Free’ 58cc model 47000km between Bangkok and Paris. The road network was barely developed at that point and you can only imagine the challenges along the way, but the machine survives to this day, on show here in Hamamatsu.

By the early 60s. Suzuki were ready to take on the world renowned challenge, the ultimate test of rider and machine – the Isle of Man TT Race. The team ran machines from 1960 but it wasn’t until Mitsuo Itoh took the ride in the 50cc class on the RM63 that Suzuki got to lift their first TT trophy.

The TT winning Suzuki RM 63
The RM63 – small but powerful!
Suzuki for the Win! Eat My Dust.

Keep posted as I head further into the 60s, 70s and dip a toe into what Suzuki had in store for the 80s

Hamamatsu – Part II

Had I set my expectation too high? What if I was disappointed? Travelling solo brings out split personalities – the one voice in my head saying ‘You have 1 day in Japan .. do you really want to spend most of it on a train?’ The rational voice replying … ‘Let’s go!’ And so … I’m here now. In Hamamatsu.

Walking past the factory, I gripped the metal fence bars and stared at the unassuming swathe of factory buildings. There was no hint here as to the impact this site has had on my 2 wheel world. No piles of rejected EFE heads, slabby top fairings waiting for paint or katana front fairing braces- ah well. I paused to gaze for a few minutes, waving my nose in the air and trying to soak up ‘something’. I imagined Hanma Shin in his workshop in there somewhere hack sawing H*ndas into bite size chunks and chuckled to myself, remembering the stickers I had packed in my bag that morning. Following the arrows, I tracked through the underpass which crossed the road and up to the steps of Suzuki Plaza.

The Factory
More Factory

I knew from my research that Suzuki Plaza was a small museum and exhibition centre near the factory and I’d gone online the night before from my hotel and booked a ticket. The accuracy of the train timetable had me land on the steps of Suzuki Plaza 5 minutes before my slot. Perfect. And there was noone else about. Even better, with not a soul around – I had the place to myself.

Front Window. Meh.

I was in. The foyer wasn’t all that. There, I said it. It’s that feeling I get when I’m reminded that as well as EFEs and GSXRs and GSs, that Suzuki also make the Swift and the Jimny. It took a collection of rare race machines to bring balance to the situation.

Graziano Rossi’s RGB500 had 2 podium finishes in the 1980 series

I checked in and took the opportunity to get a snap on the Katana displayed in Prime Position. Well, you would – wouldn’t you?

The rest of the exhibits and the museum were to be found via the stairs. Pop out for a quick ciggie because. Pinch myself. Giggle some more. Take a selfie. OK, back in. Let’s see what this is all about!

Hamamatsu – The Holy Grail

Suzuki Fever hit in my teenage years. It was the mid 90s, GSXRs ruled the streets and the mighty EFE was still winning at the tracks. Gary Rothwell was my hero and Streefighters Magazine fuelled my fever. Who knew over 20 years later, my passion would lead me to Hamamatsu, the home of Suzuki Motorcycles.

The path through life has many cross roads. Back in 1995, it was going to be either a GS550 or a GPZ550 uni trak. I’d spent my first full year on the road on a forgiving and relatively new Kwak but I now had a full bike licence in my wallet and I wanted more power. The GPZ was rougher in the flesh than the photos suggested so it was the Suzuki that was to become my daily ride and the first of many Suzukis.

20 or so years later, I had sampled most of Suzuki’s big capacity engine offerings from the 80s and 90s. I even had a few of them in the shed. That turn at the cross roads had developed into an almost obsessive passion for the machines built across the other side of this globe in a town called Hamamatsu. When a work trip to Japan left me with 1 free day, there was only one thing on my mind – how do I get to Hamamatsu?

I was staying in Yokohama Bay. The sun broke over the harbour and into my hotel room. Today was the day. Japanese trains are rightly known for both their speed and timeliness. I just had to work out which ones to get. The underground from Minatomirai took me to Shin-Yokohama and then to Tokyo Central station where I could grab the Shinkansen. It wasn’t the super fast train which suited me fine and gave me the chance to take in the paddy fields streaming past the window and a view of Mount Fuji as we sped along the coastline.

I tracked the time, watching the stops go by until finally the scrolling message in the cabin said ‘Hamamatsu’.

Heart pounding, I grabbed my bag and stepped off the train. In the distance I could see the Suzuki S drawing me in.

I tripped down the steps like a kid at school kicking out time and followed the sign as it got bigger and bigger through the grid-work town until I could see it. The factory was right there.

Part II coming soon ….

Discuss this article here >>> https://oldskoolsuzuki.info/forums/topic/12455-that-time-i-went-to-hamamatsu/

Bike of the Month July 2019

Some bikes will mean more than others.

To the person that built it, helped build it or to the person that owns it. This bike is owned by Russ750ET, after inheriting it from his dad, the universally known Pete750ET.

Pete raced this very bike in the Earlystocks championship and many of us were following his progress, either online or at one of his racemeetings.

Racing cut short after a crash in 2006, the ET was converted back to streetuse and Pete ran it as it was up to his too early departing of our favoured planet.

Sorely missed by all, including myself. I have had the privilege of meeting Pete several times over the years and you really couldn’t encounter a nicer guy.

Russ has inherited the bike from his dad with the intention of using it and finishing what his dad had envisioned for it.

Starting with the lengthening the frontend and getting rid of a squashed exhaust (courtesy of too-short Hayabusa forks), this bike is now again in a rideable state but far from finished.

I’ve never seen a bike finished, so to say a BOTM needs to be a finished article would be a lie. Even if this bike has many mods to come in the near future, we found it fitting to honour Russ with BOTM now, because for us as OldskoolSuzuki.info, it fills us with nothing but pride that we can give this bike centre-stage and show the world what these bikes can mean to so many across the globe.

Russ, thanks for keeping OSS in the loop on this bike, it’s good to see it lives on, as does your dad.

Congratulations, your ET is this months Bike of the Month

Read more here

Discuss here

Your culture is a combination of what you create and what you allow

Like most tinkerers, I’ve been a member of a few technical forums over the last 15 years. I don’t know what I would have done without them.

At one time, before social media,  I would sit at a computer and jump between 2 or 3 forums for a couple of hours every evening. Back then there was no Facebook ,twitter or Instagram. Fast forward 10 years and forums are dying off in their droves. Let’s face it,  most of them look and feel pretty clunky these days, especially when pitched against modern social media platforms. Mobile devices now dominate. If a forum isn’t mobile responsive ( optimised for viewing on a mobile device) it’s pretty much useless to anyone who isn’t sat in front of a computer. Worse still, if it is still relying on remote picture hosting like photobucket it will now be full of black squares where pictures used to sit.

In contrast, platforms like Facebook make it very easy to start an interest group and it’s simple and convenient to use from any device. Easy picture uploads, unlimited bandwidth. So who needs forums right?

In the face of all this “progress” why the fuck did we bother re-launching the oldskoolsuzuki.info technical forum? It’s not like we hadn’t seen others try to launch similar forums and fail in the interim.  Even some of the long established technical forums were emptying, replaced by Facebook groups.

Well,  the answer to that question was obvious to us from the start and chances are, it might now be dawning on others too. We wanted to be independent, we wanted to control how our space on the internet looked. We wanted to make sure we owned and controlled all of the data and privacy settings for the information our members were sharing and building.

Recent news coverage of the facebook data scandal has confirmed most peoples suspicions as well as vindicating our own decisions. Facebook know who you like, what you like, when and where you like it and who you liked it with. Facebook use that data to profile you and then they sell those profiles to businesses that want to target you for advertising. In fact, that’s the very deal you strike with Facebook; your info, in exchange for their social media platform. Facebook has been sold once already and your profile was sold with it. In case you were under any illusion about what Facebook’s product actually is; It’s you!

 

 

Our only use for facebook is as a community page to share articles from our website. Every-time we post a link on our community page, Facebook offers us the opportunity, at a price, to target new members by selecting interests, locations, age etc. That is Facebook’s principle purpose and revenue stream. Ultimately, we are not concerned  because we know that if anyone really wants to be a part of the OSS community they must  come here and register on our forum (oldskool). We know it wont be long before Facebook start charging facebook groups for the privilege of appearing on members timelines or at best, they will pepper group pages with targeted advertising. Facebook already controls the posts you see. For publishers, they are already being charged to appear on the timelines of customers, even if customers have liked and followed the page. Interest groups may follow. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

So why is www.oldskoolsuzuki.info bucking the trend? The answer to that question is simple: We re-thought the concept of a technical forum and updated it. Many have made the mistake of thinking it’s easy to run a forum. It’s not. While other forums fail or fade or take the easy option of transitioning to Facebook groups we have gone in the other direction and more than that, we have actually been successful, despite our narrow subject matter. We know this is not down to blind luck or happy accident. We did it this way by design.

Firstly,thanks to our technical Guru and man behind the curtain, Jelly, we selected the right platform. It’s mobile responsive and it’s easy to use. We have little or no restriction on picture sizes and all pictures are hosted by us. We have a well moderated forum. We have hand picked traders who offer discount to our members with 0% commission to the site. Our news page has regular updates and the site is 100% free of charge. We do the occasional t-shirt run and the money goes back to the site. Any shortfall is made up by the site Admins.  Everyone involved in running the site gives their time, effort and their skills free of charge.

Our approach has gradually attracted over 2000 people to join us over 2 years and that is largely down to our growing digital footprint across a range of digital channels but for us, the single most important point is, everything leads back here, to the URL that spawned so many other interest groups www.oldskoolsuzuki.info

Our efforts have taken time, forethought and planning by our busy team of enthusiastic mods and admins.  More importantly,of course, we would be nothing without our enthusiastic members who are willing to spend time sharing their builds and answering questions on our technical boards.

The popular illusion about forums is the idea that ” if you build it, they will come” This is  idea is outdated, simplistic and somewhat naive. In a growing universe of digital noise, how does a potential member find you? More importantly when they find you, what is it that makes them want to stick around?

In our case, we know that people will find us, we know that when they do find us and they understand us, they will stay. If they don’t understand us, well there is always Facebook.

Back to the original question; Why the fuck did we re-launch a technical forum?

We set out to build something of quality that we hoped would gradually attract like minded people from around the world.  Like everything of quality we knew we had to set out our stall with a clear and unwavering proposition and values.

  1. We wanted to be a technical forum dedicated to building up free information and expertise with the aim to  inspire, instruct and assist those that want to modify, build or race a unique oldskool Suzuki machine – We have a purpose.
  2. We are not for profit. The forum is free – We are independent.
  3. We simply want to fulfil our purpose and to do that we have strict forum rules. We rigorously enforce them to keep our content focused. – We actively maintain our culture
  4. We simply don’t give a fuck what the rest of the known world thinks about what we are doing or how we are doing it. –We have integrity

The short version: It’s about the bikes and the builds, it’s free, there are rules, If you don’t like it, you’re in the wrong place.

We are safe in the knowledge that people will either identify with our values or they wont. To date we appear to have rung a chord for many and that is gratifying but the truth is; if there were only 100 of us here but there were 100 cool projects in the project section we would still be fulfilling our purpose. oldskoolsuzuki hasn’t changed at all in that respect.

With every year that passes, the information we build together creates its own digital gravity, drawing in curious members who have stumbled across our digital breadcrumb trail on search engines or shared social media feeds. Our project section and bike of month winners are ultimately what we create. All of the info and threads are well arranged and they are always in the same place when you come back.

We are not the the pick and mix section of the internet that has become the norm over the last decade. We are a friendly bunch but we don’t suffer the sort of fools you’ll find so readily elsewhere. We are never worried about reducing our member count. Quality , not quantity is our moto. Those that instantly get it, eventually get it, or even just grin and bear it, are the people that make up our community.

Just like the bikes that we all love, build, race and ride;  the best performance always comes when you tighten up on any tolerances. We built this place as a place for  others and ourselves to enjoy. That is why we swim against the tide and maintain a forum .

So judge us on what we create rather than what we allow. That is is the true measure of any culture.

Members discuss here

Do more things that make you forget to look at your phone.

Now that it’s the end of the year, we have some time for reflection.

In the current day and age, everything is about numbers; how fast is your car, how expensive is your house, how many likes does your selfie get and how many friends do you have on Facebook?

Our OSS-world is “sort of” the same; numbers are an easy way to measure if you’re doing something right. As it is now, Facebook and other readily available social media run the world; a lot of people are just not bothered about putting in any effort at all online, because the aforementioned Facebook,Instagram or Snapchat will happily do it for you. In return means all your data is shared and sold to advertisers. This is something just about everyone just takes as a given and give it no real second thought. We do though.


Since all these We-Do-Everything-For-You platforms have come to rise, most traditional technical forums have been dwindling, and that got even worse when Photobucket thought it’d be a good idea to block all “third party hosting” (unless you were to fork over 400$/year) which meant all pics you ever used on a forum posted from Photobucket were now gone..


All this in general means many don’t bother with forums anymore; it’s just too much work. Rightly so, it is maybe a bit less straight forward than Facebook, BUT, all that You post would actually stay Yours and in the place you put it. Facebook and the pages we all frequent have one pretty big issue; useful information gets washed away in a sea of nonsense, never to be seen again, plus there’s too many “experts” that will endlessly argue over a given point without ever giving actual proof of their said expertise.

Now, since we were talking numbers, let’s make them work for us. While many forums are struggling in the face of social media, we as OSS have managed to bring over 2000 members together on a forum in 2 and a half years. Granted, these are not all active users, but 2000+ people non the less that have taken the time away from the usual internet to immerse themselves into our world. Some will stay, some will flounce, it’s been the same since day one; OSS really isn’t the most easy place for outsiders; we like people to put in some effort, not your usual play on the internet.

This is all done to “naturaly select” those that would have no place amongst us. You either bring something to the table, or you leave.

2000+ members, 10 Raceteam members (at time of writing) and growing fast, 300+ project topics with more getting started every day, OSS has proven to be a good place to hide away from the fast/short/simple that is the daily internet, to find it all a bit more in depth and (for me personally anyway) a generally more relaxing atmosphere. Just remember to read the rules.

From me to you, thank you for visiting, posting, engaging on Oldskoolsuzuki.info and helping us spread our beliefs on the internet and in real life during bike nights and the bigger events, it’s greatly appreciated. It must mean we as a team of people are doing something right and the decision of bringing back OSS as a stand-alone website has been the right one.

Let’s get 2017 behind us and go forward to 2018; more projects that are actually easily to follow and properly documented, more high profile Winged Hammer racebikes run across the globe and let us meet up somewhere along the way.

We promise to not make you want to look at your phone every 10 minutes. Just check in every once in a while, when you feel like it and share with us what you have been doing. Most importantly, do so safe in the knowledge that it will still be there when you come back and no one is going to sell your digital soul for a quick buck.

See you next year, thanks,

Rene EFE

Discuss here

NB; All bikes in this article are built, owned and maintained by the Admin team. If you like what you see and would like to know more, please join our forum and get in on all the fun. We’re a friendly bunch.

Never give up on something you can’t go a day without thinking about…

1011022_189366621226132_1459505250_nLooking back on the years between when the original OSS faded and the months and weeks directly before we brought OSS back from the dead, there were some that thought we should have let sleeping dogs lie. OSS had lived out it’s natural life cycle and should remain assigned to the past along with, for most of us,  our late 30’s and our 40’s. There was a belief that we could never hope to re-capture the magic because those days had passed and so much had changed in the world and in our lives. The brotherhood that thrived during the OSS heydays had fragmented into a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds. Too much time had passed to sound the great horn once again and bring all the parts back together.

Back then we were united by an idea. The idea that we could take a 10 year old bike and armed with a smug sense of self belief , the power of shared knowledge, cunning engineering and self anointed divine righteousness we could single handedly nullify all of the progress that the Japanese motorcycle industry had made over 20 years  by outperforming all modern machinery and embarrassing  their owners with our re-engineered  prehistoric wonders. I don’t know if we ever truly succeeded with any constancy but it felt good trying and the shared belief that what we were doing was worthwhile provided us all with a real sense of belonging at OSS and a strong collective identity.

Fast forward 10 years and a new age is upon us. People are actually welding slabby subframes back on! Slabby bodywork, which once lay discarded at the back of sheds all over Europe, because it couldn’t be given away, is now being traded for the price of a small Caribbean  island. The world and his wife now wants to own a standard 80s 0r 90s sports bike.

So what place can there be in this new world  for a relic of a website  from the naughties and its foolhardy inhabitants who continue to dedicate themselves  to the retro upgrade of what have now become expensive contemporary classics?

Well, take one look at the project section and you’ll see that little has changed in the respect that we are still trying to re-engineer bikes from the 80’s and 90’s and while turbos where something for the favoured few back then they have become standard trim in recent years thanks to people like Dave Dunlop making it look easy.( it’s not)

There are also a number of changes in our identity that have been more organic than engineered. In truth, we didn’t know how may of our original members would return and we didn’t know what we might end up with when we re-animated the corpse of OSS.

So what else has changed? and where has it led us? Well, for one thing, we are all a little older, a little wiser, a lot more experienced and for many of us we have a little more disposable income than we did 10 years ago. What this means is that that the quality of what we can build has improved along with the finish and the over all quality of the components we can buy. So in short 15 years later, most of us are building the bikes we couldn’t hope to have afforded to build or hoped to execute 10-15 years ago. (middle age rocks)

The second welcome development is the  rise in popularity of post classic racing and other straightliner events. This  has led to a renaissance in building OSS bikes fit for purpose. There are still plenty of street bikes being built but there are more and more of our bikes being built to compete. Last year, 2 of our bikes of the month took world records at Pendine Sands and one was an  international post classic racing series winner. We also have a number of members building their bikes solely to compete in various race events.

While the original site did have a few racers ( Go Runt Go!) we never really gave them a special place on the site.  Over the last year we have recognised the importance of those that choose old school Suzuki motorcycles as their foundation for a building a competitive machine. This has convinced us that we need to provide a race section on the site and we need to create an OSS identity for our growing band of intrepid competitors.  Over the next few months the Oldskoolsuzuki International Race Team will start to take shape. We have begun working on a new winged hammer logo as the team emblem that racers will be able to proudly display on their bikes. We will also hope to encourage companies to offer the Race Team discounts in exchange for coverage and trader status. We also hope members may also be able to try to support with parts when possible.

There will of course be rules ( Fucking rules) this is OSS after all. To be a Racer you will have to be a current competitor in an organised race series or competitive straight-liner event. We will also expect you to keep us all informed of your antics in the race section.

Keep your eyes peeled for the race team launch before the end of 2016.

So, we might not be the OSS that we once were ,but in truth, we are a far better fit for the world we now find ourselves in. OSS is just a website, without the passion that we all share and the time that we all dedicate to updating our threads and sharing our knowledge, it would be nothing more than a blank page.

Thank you everyone for continuing to waste your valuable time with us. May your 10mm socket always be where you thought you left it and may the power of  Hanma-Shin’s mighty hammer be with you, always.

And for those lost OSS brothers and sisters still wandering , we sound the great horn once again and hope that you hear its call.

 

 

 

Happy Birthday to us.

This time last year we were getting ready to press the go live button on the re-launch of oldskoolsuzuki.info. At the time we were all worried whether it would work and whether anyone would actually turn up.

Classic bike mechanic

As we approach our 1st birthday we have the benefit of hindsight and fortunately you did turn up. Not only did you turn up but you stuck around and you shared your workshop antics and your crazed shed born master plans with us through nearly 8000 project posts. The projects section remains our busiest section and that confirms that we got the emphasis of what the site should be about right.

The project section has provided us with a steady supply of worthy bike of the month winners over the last 12 months. Each one is a fine ambassador for what OSS is all about. There are plenty of others in the project pipeline.

During the year we left Jurassic Park and introduced Hanma-Shin’s mighty hammer to guide our way.Not an easy decision but we haven’t looked back.

Ancient Hamna-shinWe closed the old Facebook gang hut where we had all hung out waiting for the site to relaunch and we launched a new community page on Facebook. So much has changed since the days of the original forum and social media has become so slick and easy to use. Even the new site feels clunky in comparison to today’s’ social media platforms. Nonetheless, we set out to create an oldskool forum where our collective endeavours would be recorded in a structured and ordered way, for easy reference. We have improved picture uploads to encourage people to share their pictures ( we still like those). Forums will never again be the social gathering that they were a decade ago but they still make the best place to spend an hour or 2 a week browsing the threads and sections to see what’s new and if you’re serious about information sharing, there is no substitute.

Throughout the year we’ve put on 2 show stands and this summer we have a Cadwell track-day social event, a Donington weekend show gathering and a dyno day.  Not bad for a bunch of part time enthusiasts. Which leads me to my final point. At the end of the day the site and forum will only ever be the sum of its members and their input. Our thanks to everyone for taking the time to share their builds, their wisdom. their questions and ultimately their time to keep OSS alive and kicking. A special thanks must go to the volunteers that give up their time to moderate, organise events, stickers, hoodies and t-shirts. There would be no OSS without you.

If you have any good ideas for content and info and you want to get more involved send us a message through the contact link at the bottom of the forum or PM an Admin.

So happy Birthday OSS. You’re still here and given your historical struggles, that’s no mean feat.

Discuss this article here.