KZ1000 cafe racer tinkering

[td5_pete]

Just a log of what I've been up to with the z1000 to get it ready for the spring.
Absolutely no pearls of wisdom here - I'm picking this up as I go along.
Absolutely nothing adventurous here as I'm a mere beginner.

First job for any new bike with unknown provenance is oil and filters.

Warmed the engine up and tried to budge the drain plug. No joy. Needed a breaker bar on it and seriously thought i was going to pull the whole sump off, but it did eventually give and (only) 1 litre of warm black treacle came out. The magnetic drain plug looked like it had a spiky hair cut it had so much swarf on it.
This is not a good start.

The oil filter housing produced another half litre of oil, and the next suprise...the wrong filter !

Here's what came out, and what I put back in :



Looks like the filter may have just been covering the bottom oil pickup hole but barely - so hopefully some filtering has happened.

Looks like the previous owner wasn't too hot on maintenance.

Filled it up with 3.5 litres of good stuff. I'll do the oil and filter again in 500 miles and see where we are...

[td5_pete]

Next job - sort out the wiring as there seemed to be a few botches.

(1) Fuses were all wrong and the housing had melted at some point. Had been botched with a couple of inline fuse holders
- Found a replacement fuse box from a KR-1S on eBay for 99p was identical. Wired it in and put correct fuses in.
(2) Found a few wires with insulation rubbed through to the copper.
- replaced and re-routed these and put them in sleeves.
(3) Found only 9.8v was reaching the coils with a good 12v at the battery. Old ignition/kill switch wiring with too much resistance I guess.
- Wired in a relay to trigger off the kill switch that gives direct 12v feed to the coils from the starter solenoid input.
(Used a Hella car spotlight wiring kit here which i had lying around and was partially pre-wired and with a useful blade fuse holder for the 10A fuse)



(4) The electrics on the bike had been moved under the seat when the bike was modded, but it reality they were exposed and only 'hidden' by a couple of bent pieces of aluminium sprayed black
- I found an ABS box of the correct size and modified this to house all the electrics. Needed also to modify the seat fixings to bolt through the box in stainless steel sleeves. The end result is quite tidy

[td5_pete]

Next Job - Investigate why the previous owner had put in very hot plugs (B5ES)... he said that cylinder #1 plug was coking up and that the hot plugs had solved it. ( ...and the bike seemed to run nicely when i rode it back home after buying it )

(1) One nice suprise was to find DYNA ignition and coils.... and I hope that the wiring mod I described in the previous post to wire the coils up to the battery through a relay will have helped - as I read that a weak spark can be a factor (There was only 9.8v at the coils prior to my mod).

(2) The inlet on cylinder #1 was very 'wet' and I reckon that cylinder had been over-fuelling massively. I found the float valve on carb #1 was sticking and the float level was high. Fuel was intermittently pissing out of the overflow. I took the carb bowl off and cleaned the float valve which had a ring of gunk around it and wasn't sealing properly. Tweaked the float height on #1 while I was at it. The other 3 float valves were also cleaned - they were also gunked up, but nowhere near as bad.

(3) Inlet valve on #1 was very tight - must have been 0.01 because when I went for the next shim down I ended up with 0.06 - Not sure if this would have contributed to the cokeing.

(4) Removed the oil cooler which was an old Lockhart item. Replaced the take off's with a standard oil pressure housing.



Put in a new set of B8ES plugs (Another nasty suprise was that the thread in #2 cylinder is compromised. I felt it straight away as I teased the old plug out - it was tight all the way... managed to ease the new plug in and it does torque down - I'll leave this challenge for another day )

Primed the carbs, crossed my fingers - and she started up second prod of the starter.
A quick ride around the block and she seems to be running good.

[Ginger Bear]

Sounds like things are going the right way.

Any chance of a pic of the whole bike

[td5_pete]

Some more fixes :

Found that there was no throttle 'push' cable on the bike - The sleeve was there, but it had no cable in it. Ordered one from wemoto.com for £9 and it arrived the next day. Fitted it and adjusted the cable stops and free play according to the clymer manual.

Also took a look at the rear shocks. I removed the springs from the shock units and discovered that there was absolutely no damping in the pistons ( I thought it was a bit bouncy ! )
Ordered a new pair of Hagons.
The back-end now feels rock hard in comparison.
Also the ride height seems to be about 10mm up - I'm hoping they'll settle a bit over the next few hundred miles.

Modified the custom battery carrier a little, and replaced the battery with an 11Ah (down from a 14Ah) which is the same footprint, but less tall. The original 14Ah was impossible to remove from the bike without dismantling half of it. Definitely a case of form over function.

Also done a bit of polishing, replaced the ignition cover which had crash damage, and replaced a load of crankcase cover screws with allen bolts as most of them had been completely butchered at some point in the past.

Here is what she looks like now :

[Mark Tiller]

Did the oil filter have the spring and washer fitted to hold it up in the engine?

[td5_pete]

Did the oil filter have the spring and washer fitted to hold it up in the engine?

Well it had the spring.... There was no washer. I'll need to sort one out for the next time I change the oil in a couple of months.

[Redbeard]

making good progress with it, i might see it out on the road in the near future.

[Mr Puffin]

I like the overall look of that pete, my 1100 septic is turning out similar

Looks like all the repairs upgrades have been keeping you busy, for the #2 plug thread if you dont have one buy or borrow a Tap to clean the threads up