Problems with the Suzuki K5

tlplanet.com/forums/showthre … post634962

This is why you shouldn’t buy the newest model of any vehicle the first year its out. Gotta wait until they find all the defects and fix them. I’m glad I waited to buy my ZX10R the 2nd year after it came out. The first production bikes had defective rims.

[quote=“KawasakiRider”]http://www.tlplanet.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=634962#post634962

This is why you shouldn’t buy the newest model of any vehicle the first year its out. Gotta wait until they find all the defects and fix them. I’m glad I waited to buy my ZX10R the 2nd year after it came out. The first production bikes had defective rims.[/quote]

My parents taught me that from the time I was small (for cars, but same idea). They said always wait until the 3rd or 4th year, and never buy the bottom model in a maker’s lineup, since even good quality mfrs skimp on that.
Good advice, really.

receiving lava hot reviews the new Gixxer 1K, by all accounts a giant slayer arriving head and shoulders above the rest of the class of flagship 1000cc race reps… BUT… those photos say a lot… decimated bike after a 35mph get off?.. I’d say it comes with the territory of these new wave of ultra light, Controlled Fill die cast manufactured frames… allowing designers and engineers to put material where they need it and not where they don’t to save weight and have impossibly complex and thin casts at reasonable mass production costs is great for building trick new ultra light race rep sportsbikes… BUT… don’t expect them to crash well…

it’s all good here on little olde Taiwan anyway, since the greasy little fools in govt. have decided that despite the GSXR thou K5 being California and Euro-3 compliant, it doesn’t meet Taiwan’s pollution emissions requirements… how A-Bian and his pack of poorly trained chimps can honestly claim that they have standards of any kind, let alone air pollution and emissions standards is beyond me… but the fact that they can claim with a straight face that emissions standards in Taiwan are stricter than California and Euro-3 is utterly laughable…

anyway, the bottom line is that I’ve got a mate who’s been trying to get a K5 past the emissions tests since May, they try every 2 weeks and fail dismally… even with only 2 cylinders firing and the power commander reset to only give it a fraction of the fuel it should be getting, and the CAT in place… it still won’t pass… :unamused: no not much danger of anyone getting one on the roads of Taiwan too soon…

Those frame welds in the photos are atrocious. That’s not bad design work, it’s sloppy TiG welding.

Agreed…That frame should have never left the factory. :astonished:

Plasmatron, with K5s not road legal, it looks like my ZX10r is still the baddest motherf**ker on the block, at least in Taiwan. :laughing:

Sounds like they are going to have a major recall with bs welds like those.

[quote=“Bubba 2 Guns”]Sounds like they are going to have a major lawyer feeding frenzy with bs welds like those.[/quote]There, fixed that for ya. :wink:

I’m not sure it is the welds… in almost all the pics the welds seem to be intact but the frame has fractured in the cast sections…

take a look at the frame construction of the '05 GSXR 1K:
The entire head stock assembly and swing arm pivot assembly are cast and welded to an extruded center section…

The red lines in this pic are where the TIG welds run, whereas the blue line is where it seems to have fractured, right across the hole in the frame spar for the ram air intake scoops… no welds there, it’s all cast…

In the pics below you can also see where the welds (circled) are intact above and below the fractures in the cast section of the frame…

I still think the only “failure” here, if there is one, is that the new Controlled Fill Casting process means very thin, very light, comparatively large cast sections that are going to be nowhere near as crashable as older frames… perhaps an engineer at Suzuki got his stress calculations wrong for the area across the frame spar where the air intake had to go… to me the welds seem fine though… :idunno:

Oh, those pix are back up. They were all maxxed out yesterday.

I meant these pix. You can see in these there is little to no significant penetration of substrate material. I assumed (yup) the two failures were in the same mode. My bad.
<-- hangs head in shame

You’re quite right that the fractures in the pix above are not on any welds, different issue entirely. It is supremely difficult to make consistent castings that thin. It makes you wonder if the problem was metalurgical, poor process control or just overly confident design (low safety factor).

I bet the Harley guys are laughing their asses off at this, bent rim vs. bike broken in two. :unamused:

well, maybe a few head shakes and some long “DAaaaaammn them ricers break easy!”
Further confirmation that HD’s are safer in a lot of crashes, especially low speed ones like this. Just simple physics I guess.
<=== rode HD’s for 24+ yrs and sold my 98 FLH prior to coming to the island.

[quote=“hsiadogah”]Oh, those pix are back up. They were all maxxed out yesterday.

I meant these pix. [/quote]

Oh… sorry… my mistake, I didn’t see those pics at all… you’re quite right, those are just extremely dodgy welds… looks almost like they used Mg-Si alloy TIG rods to weld Zn-Mg material (or some suchlike combination)… or even just didn’t heat treat it properly… those pics look like 7071 alloy bicycle frame welds would if they haven’t been properly T6 heat treated… welds just shouldn’t fall apart under plain old cornering stresses… :astonished:

I’d say that in the pics I posted above it’s to some extent just what comes with the territory with these new casting procedures… they found the holy grail of thin, light, complex, affordably mass producable, major component casts, but they come at a price… disposable frames :noway: … I’ve read about Yamaha Fazer FZ-6’s sub frames disintegrating in crashes as well and they’re made using the same new CF Casting processes, although at least that’s just the sub frame… seems like having your entire frame explode during a 35mph off is the risk you take if only the latest ultra performance, ultra light race reps will do you…

me, I only use bike frames that are CNC milled from a solid block of billet titanium… er… no really :smiley:

ha ha… true… although the way most of the yokels ride, you’ve got nothing to fear even if they do manage to get themselves on K5’s…

[quote=“plasmatron”]those pics look like 7071 alloy bicycle frame welds would if they haven’t been properly T6 heat treated[/quote]Except that in that case, you’d still have penetration almost to the inside of the tube section… :wink: