Kinroad Chinese bike refurbishment
Back in February 2015 I thought I should refurbish my Chinese motorcycle a Kinroad GY200 as a bit of a project.
For those that don’t know in 2005/6 there was a fairly large number of cheap Chinese motorcycles that arrived in the UK. There were numerous manufacturers, although they were all using similar engines and cycle parts, bit like what happened with British motorcycle industry in the 50s ,& 60s with Villiers or AMC engines and cycle parts.
The Chinese had basically copied a Honda engine, I don’t know if they applied to Honda for a licence to build these engines, but I guess the Chinese just do whatever they like. The engines in these bikes were manufactured by United Motors in China from 50cc singles to 400cc twins. There were a lot of 125cc and 200cc bikes sold in the UK.
Since then things have moved on quite a bit, as the Chinese bikes have made great leaps in there quality and design.
https://www.alibaba.com/countrysearch/CN/united-motors-motorcycle.html
Anyway, I decided to give my Chinese bike a bit of a refurbishment as these Chinese bike suffer from wear and tear more than most bikes nowadays. My initial intention was to strip the bike and get the frame powder coated so I anticipated spending £100 on the job. But as you know what its like, you think well I may as well do this and do that and then end up doing & spending a lot more.
So I stripped the bike on 10th February 2015, dropped my frame and cycle parts of at Nipro in Walkden for blasting, that cost me £65 and was ready for collection on the 16th February.
Whilst the frame was being blasted I cleaned up other parts, measured and ordered a load of stainless steel bolts for all the fixtures and cleaned up and painted the engine, which didn’t need anything doing to it, apart from an oil change as it had been a reliable of solid engine, the Chinese certainly did a good job with that engine. I also ordered a new exhaust system and rear shock from China Parts in Durham, all parts were very easy to get hold of at the time, but starting to get more difficult now.
As the front wheel was looking a bit rusty I also ordered a new front wheel and swapped the front disc over to the new wheel.
When I got the frame back from blasting I took it straight to John Heaton of Hi-Tech Coatings in Rainford for powder coating, this cost me £100 and as usual, as long as you get the blasting done first John did a great job of the powder coating in black of course. Again this only took a few days to be powder coated and I picked all the bits up from Hi-Tech Coatings on 21st February and started the reassembly of the bike.
The bike was then completed and running again by 27th February 2015.
Sometime later I noticed some of the spokes in the rear wheel had snapped so I had the rear wheel respoked with a new British chrome rim. If you look on forums for these bikes you’ll find its a common problem with these bikes snapping spokes, hopefully the fact I’ve had the work on the wheel done here in the UK the problem will be sorted now.
In the end I spent about £1,000 on this refurbishment of this Chinese bike, some may think its foolish to spend this amount of money on these bikes, but I think its made a big difference to the bike and was well worth the money I’ve spent on it and compared to what we spend on restoration of British bikes is a mere drop in the ocean.
