83 Spectre Petcock Questions

Hi all,It’s been a while, but after life tried to take over, I’m back to rebuilding my Spectre.Decided to pull the petcock for inspection. I’ve never pulled one before and it came out in two parts, with the plastic filter tower separated from the main housing. Is that supposed to happen? I had expected it to be one unit. Is it supposed to be a pressure fit? If so, it’s def too loose.Second, I’m having difficulty identifying it for replacement and/ or rebuild purposes. It reads Taiko Giken on the back and has a small stamp reading Z26 on the flange that meets the tank. I’ll try and get a photo attached below.Thanks in advance for any info. Brion

You can try to made a thick paper gasket to hold the filter tower in place,

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Looks like the genuine parts are still available.

www.partzilla.com/catalog/kawasaki/motor...e-kz750-n2/fuel-tank

Don’t know why I’m holding back on just dropping another $105 on this part. It’s not like I have held back on much else I’ve really needed on this machine so far. I want it to run well.

I guess it’s because I still don’t understand how this one exactly failed. I don’t know how tightly the tower should normally be seated in the petcock and there aren’t any wear marks, scuffs, or residue on the seat of either part. They appeared to come out together, even after the tank being inverted and moved around, They just separated in my hand as I gently pulled the unit out of the tank.

I just need to sort out if this is really a catastrophic failure or some other situation that might be brain fart or a simply repair.

If anyone can definitely tell me “yup, that’s an f-ed up part”, I’ll move on.

Thanks - B

It is not a very tight fit. You could lightly scar up the hole the filter plugs into. The raised metal will grab the plastic. Alternatively, you could carefully put a small dab of fuel resistant glue on the plastic protrusion. 

As long as the beveled sealing surface for the diaphragm’s oring is in really good shape, I would get new rubber bits to rebuild what you have.

Well, still spent about $50 on little rubbery parts. Disassembly revealed that it seemed worthwhile. 

I think I’m going to try some placing some delicate punch marks in the side walls of the metal seat, kinda like fret tangs, maybe two on each side, and see if that grips the filter tower. Going to do it last because I doubt I’m going to get away with test fitting and reseating

I often post this Petcock Rebuild Tutorial . It's for the Yamaha petcocks but they are very similar. As for the filter, I wouldn't worry too much about it falling out. If you run a filter before the carbs you'll catch the tank debris before it gets to the carbs. 

Interesting. The PO had a cheap filter inline from the tank to the carb and now it makes sense. I’m guessing they knew about the condition of the petcock. There have been a bunch of these little discoveries as I’ve torn this bike down, like the wooden shim hidden behind the tach, or the bicycle tube patching the harness under the tank, just to name a couple. To be fair, it ran pretty well before I started tearing into it but detail oriented it definitely wasn’t. 

A lot of us run a secondary filter. I would try a dab of gas resistant glue on the petcock filter as TexasKZ suggested. For inline filters I use genuine Visu filters.  Amazon Visu Filter
Avoid the cheap copies. 

If you run without the filter tower, you will no longer have the reserve function as the tubes are inside the filter.

Thanks guys. I’m waiting on the rebuild parts and some pretty fuel line to arrive so in the meanwhile I’ll strip all my work back down to the carbs so I can attach the lines that I should have attached before I installed the carbs (ugh, grrrrr). and I thought getting the throttle cable on after the fact was tricky! Live and learn. 

Should have this thing turning over next week. I will post photos