Ron's 1991 600 Katana

Back in 2001, I got tired of always working on my Waverunner and decided to get rid of it. I used the proceeds from the sale of that to buy this 91 Katana 600 in May of 2001 with 3,365 miles on the clock. It was pretty clean with the exception of scuffs on both fairings right on the "bubble" over the engine covers. It had no signs over ever having been dropped other than those scuffs and ran superb. I had been out of riding for about eight years at that point, but the skills came back quickly. Besides, at the time, gas was getting expensive again and I rode pretty much every day since work is 30 miles each way. In reality, I just love to ride and even though it was commuting, it was riding and that is the point, right?

First thing that had to go was the rear fender. I did my own hack job on that and relocated the tag bracket to just under the tail light for a nice clean look. With that little detail out of the way, I had to get rid of those huge turn signals in the back, so I ordered a set of K&S short stalk mini signals that mimicked the stock appearance, but with half the size. The addition of those finished the look I wanted for the tail. At the same time, I also ordered a set of flush mount signals for the front to get rid of the stock signals at that end. I absolutely hate to cut up or drill into fairings though, so when I mounted those, instead of bolting them to the fairings, I used some 1/8" aluminum stock and re-drilled the mounting holes in the base of the signals to avoid the fairings. What I ended up with was a method of bolting the signals on by sandwiching the fairing in between the signal and the mounting plate. Luckily, the K&S signals came with bullet type connectors that mated up to the stock connectors, so I did not have to do any wiring changes.

Around this time, Doug, from Maximum-Suzuki, emailed me and
said he was cleaning some crap out of his garage and found a
K&N stock type replacement filter he had put in his Katana 750.
Doug ended up sending me the K&N and air box plate. Never
asked a dime from me! I started thinking that maybe this guy
was OK for a Navy boy! This was the beginnings of diving into
performance enhancements that will probably be a never ending
story. I ended up making a set of .030 shims for the carb needles
to set the carbs up for the K&N and used the small velocity ring
for the air box opening. Sound familiar? Later, Doug also sent
me his Full Yoshimura exhaust system for the cost of shipping.
When that arrived, I pulled the small velocity ring and finally
ended up going up one size on the mail jets to get the carbs set
up just right. What this should tell you is yes, a 750 exhaust
system WILL work on a 600!

Through all this, the bike suffered two tip-overs on the left side due
to rolling off a kick stand that was not completely down. This taught
me to ALWAYS park the bike in gear! End result here was a broken
mirror on one occasion, so I ordered a full set. This also ended up
scuffing that fairing up a bit more and pissing me off in general. I
have owned numerous bikes in the past and had NEVER had a
street bike hit the ground and now this one had gone down TWICE
while sitting still. The last straw was while riding to work one
morning, I was doing about 5MPH and in the process of going
around a puddle in the road, the front slid out in some sludge at the
side of the road. End result on this one? Broken mirror on right
side, Zero Gravity smoke wind screen destroyed, pipe received a
few minor scrapes, right lower broken, and right fairing scuffed
and cracked in two places. I had my wife, Donna, bring my stock
wind screen to work during lunch and just happened to have my
spare right side mirror at work for some reason, so I replaced those and rode it home. I left it like this for the next few months.