Back in 2016 I started a new job, and it was a good excuse to upgrade from the DR350. Without really trying I spot a clean-looking DRZ-E up for sale locally, popped over to check it out, and ended up buying it! It looked tidy, ran smoothly, and appeared to have been looked after with clean oil, and new cables, chain and sprockets. So it all seemed good.
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Well, it was a sound bike, but had been worked on by people(s) severely lacking in mechanical skills, or indeed any common sense!
A quick trip up the road to check things out properly, was indeed just a quick trip as I had to turn back home straightaway - the front end felt terrible, really skittish and light feeling, very unlike a DRZ, what was going on? Aha, some bright spark had pushed the forks down in the clamps, maybe to gain a bit of height on the bars, and screwed up the geometry. This on its own would perhaps not have completely messed up the handling but it was made much worse from the very hard forks, which was easily resolved by undoing the air bleed screws, both of which were very full of compressed air and let out quite a hiss!
No wonder the previous owner didn't get on with the bike... With the normal geometry restored the next road test was also short-lived when I noticed smoke pouring off the exhaust header pipe! What the heck?!
Ah, I remembered the PO saying something about the header pipe touching the oil breather catchment box and why he had covered the pipe in exhaust wrap.
Instead of fixing the problem.....
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Exciting picture eh!
This was just a short section, there must have been about 3m of the stuff!It didn't take long to discover the oil breather catchment box had a hole melted in the bottom, and not surprisingly was leaking oil straight onto the pipe. This thing:
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So that had to be repaired, and the header pipe straightened back to its normal state as it had obviously been knocked and bent, and hence why it was touching the catchment box, doh.
