When rebuilding a 1975 Harley-Davidson SX250 that had been sitting for well over 20 years, I obviously found the old clutch fiber plates to be bad. The clutch was rusted together from normal condensation from temperature changes and the fiber plates were falling apart. The steels were fine, just needed cleaning up. I figured I’d get on the internet and find a new set of drive plates pretty fast, but the only thing I found out fast was that there seems to be very little available, and anything new is going to be 40 to 50 years old. I did find NOS plates on ebay, but they were selling them one at a time and wanted stupid money for those old plates.
As usual the wheels started turning and I was thinking that surely there were other clutch plates out there that would fit, but I found nothing on the internet again, so I started looking at random clutches and trying to see if there was any measurements out there. No luck. After wasting at least 2 hours on this I remembered that a customer was nice enough to stick me with a new EBC Suzuki 1400 set of clutch plates. It was a complete long shot, but if I could remember where I stored them I could see how they sized up. It wasn’t long until I found them and remarkably they were almost perfect. The outer diameter of the clutch surface was as close as you could get to being exact, they had the right number of drive tabs, they were just a little bit too wide to work. I immediately thought of cutting the tabs down, but it seemed so easy to find a set of plates that fit, I figured I go check some more. I remembered a 250 ninja clutch laying around here but there was no way that would fit. I checked the internet one last time and the answer was no, I would not find something else.
What are the chances of having the only set of clutch plates that are close enough to work just laying around? Not to mention the fact that they were here because a customer rudely stuck me with them by not showing up to have them installed, and on top of that I paid for them without taking a deposit because he was a regular customer, and figured he would show up and I would be ready to do the job. There is definitely something bigger than all of us.
Anyway all I had to do now was cut all those drive tabs to the right width. I took some measurements and it happened to work out that I basically needed to take the width of a band saw blade off each side of the tabs. i figured this would take forever, because you have to be extremely careful and keep them straight and you want them all the same width. So I went to the band saw and got started and quickly found out this wasn’t too hard. Not only that but I would say the whole job went pretty easily and only took about an hour to an hour and a half.
I cleaned up and carefully sized the edges of the tabs with a file. I left them just a hair bigger, so I could do this and get a really nice fit. Next i had to measure the stack height. The Suzuki clutch plates were a bit thinner than the original Harley ones, but once more luck was on my side and all I had to do was add one more fiber plate and one more steel. Fortunately steel plates were available on the internet and it really doesn’t matter that they are old. The Suzuki clutch also has 3 more plates than the original, so I had plenty to work with. the final stack height ended up within .015″ of the original. Perfect. The whole thing worked out great , so I figured I would post this if you run into this problem. Hope this helps someone out.
The EBC part number for this is CK-3382. This fits Suzuki Intruder’s / Boulevard’s 1987 to 2008.
