TOPIC:

FWIW

Gardner Racing Concepts is an excellent place to get crankshafts repaired.

www.grccranks.com/

leon

Most of the late GPz1100 18 mm cranks have this problem - again, due to the disintegration of the stock Kawasaki thrust bearing / washers.....

Kray-Z wrote: Most of the late GPz1100 18 mm cranks have this problem - again, due to the disintegration of the stock Kawasaki thrust bearing / washers.....

Does that include the 17mm GPZ1100B1 crank???? or was it because the 18mm GPZ produced more power.

Thank you for your replies.
I guess I was hoping for somebody to tell me a better way to be sure about the crank and that I was doing it wrong when tightening the crank in the cases.
I know I need to build the motor on a good crank, I have too much money invested in this to chance it.
The thing is, KipKawa is closed and Alan Cooper stopped answering mails. So I paid a lot of money for scrap metal. Awesome. I still have the old crank I will have rebuild at a local shop.

I think the big question is, what condition is your old crank in based on millage, abuse etc?. I would consider these cranks in a standard motor that has not been abused/ thrashed to run for a bloody long time > 300K kms so what you might consider old might not be.
I twisted my crank on the Z1R after well over 220K kms and I abused the crap out of it when I was young and later (after 100K kms the engine had mods) and still it kept on going.
Have your old crank checked etc by a known workshop and they should steer you in the right direction.
Obviously if you are building an engine with a lot more power go for the rebuilt special cranks.

Bozo wrote:

Kray-Z wrote: Most of the late GPz1100 18 mm cranks have this problem - again, due to the disintegration of the stock Kawasaki thrust bearing / washers.....

Does that include the 17mm GPZ1100B1 crank???? or was it because the 18mm GPZ produced more power.

I don't know about the 17 mm 1100's...out of the 5 Uni-Track GPz1100's I have checked, only one has an undamaged thrust bearing (at 18 000 miles on the odometer - the lowest mileage of all of the 5).

At lest three have damage to the #5 main bearing caused by the thrust washers disintegrating and hard bits of washer running through the bearings, which pretty well wrecks the crank and prevents re-building.

I have 4 17 mm cranks removed from low mileage 1000 J / M / K bikes and 1 standard shaft drive 1100 crank, and they all have worn thrust washers; the end clearances are at or beyond 0.3 mm. I can't say for sure about the #5 main bearing on those, but I think one of the 1000's is toast. the others seem to be ok - for now...