Got it! 1976 KZ900 Ltd

I know alot of you can understand, but I never thought I'd be this far into summer and not be riding the 900! The girls helped me get the cylinders on over the pistons last weekend (took about 30 minutes) and I thought I was picking up momentum, but in getting the cam idlers ready, I found the needle bearing in the front idler was loose in the sprocket, Aargh! I'm trying some permatex high-temp red locktite to see if it will hold things together, otherwise it's $76 plus shipping plus another week before I can finish putting the engine back together!

So to cheer myself up, I put the emblems on my side covers. I'm not sure how well you can tell, but I think the color looks pretty OEM. It's acrylic urethane from paintworkz, pinstripes from reproductiondecals and a local professional painter. Here are some before and after shots:

The sidecovers turned out great! Bummer about the idler gear bearing, but better to catch it now rather than later

Thanks, looks like my sprocket fix worked, so I'm going to buy a couple of Fat Tire bombers (i.e. 24 oz) on the way home to entice my neighbors over to help fit the head back on. Already bench-shimmed the valves, so hopefully I can jump right into the timing!

When I had my 76 900 it had single front disk and drum rear brakes. Looks like a straight easy project you have there. Looks like everything is there so that's half the battle... Congrats!

Maybe I'd better retitle this "I'm not bitter, but...."

This is the first time the FSM let me down. In following the manual on installing the cam shafts, it says "Feed the exhaust camshaft through the chain, turn it so that the mark on the sprocket is aligned with the cylinder head and rest into place". Well, you guessed it, I must have put the exhaust camshaft in 180 deg out.

I was a little concerned that the sprockets weren't lining up perfect, a couple of degrees off, but I got them in the closest position I could. Finished installing everything and hand cranked it several times and did hear a clunk once or twice, but couldn't get it consistant. Thought I should do a compression test, so I set everything up and using the starter with FOT got 0, 0, 0, 15 psi!

I was so upset I had to put it away for a week. Borrowed a leakdown tester and had air spewing out both the inlet and exhaust....never could get more than 10 psi to show, even with 100 psi air pressure. Didn't feel anything from the crankcase so I'm hoping my new rings are ok, but I probably wasn't building enough pressure to show.

Pulled the head and here's what I have.



I thought I was going to have to fill the combustion chambers with fluid to figure out which were leaking, but you can see the exhaust valves are visibly jacked. I'm just going to take it back to the mechanic to check the straightness of the valves and find out how many were bent.

Since I started this, I'm read other threads that indicate I need to put the lobes as much opposite as I can. Could anyone tell me if the FSM does say this somewhere or are we supposed to intuit it?

Thanks for listening.

pge 48-49 in the ma kaw manual,definately rolled some valves over

Link14 wrote:

I know alot of you can understand, but I never thought I'd be this far into summer and not be riding the 900! The girls helped me get the cylinders on over the pistons last weekend (took about 30 minutes) and I thought I was picking up momentum, but in getting the cam idlers ready, I found the needle bearing in the front idler was loose in the sprocket, Aargh! I'm trying some permatex high-temp red locktite to see if it will hold things together, otherwise it's $76 plus shipping plus another week before I can finish putting the engine back together!

So to cheer myself up, I put the emblems on my side covers. I'm not sure how well you can tell, but I think the color looks pretty OEM. It's acrylic urethane from paintworkz, pinstripes from reproductiondecals and a local professional painter. Here are some before and after shots:

wow!

Thanks for the response Plummen. Hmmm, my Z1 manual has the drive shaft assembly/dis-assembly on pgs 48-49. If you get a chance, I'd appreciate it if you could scan or quote what it says about lobe orientation. Somewhere I read on one of the threads that the #4 lobes should be pointing at each other at TDC and mine aren't.

Click on any of the following images to enlarge the view.

There are also some earlier threads with better photographs submitted by members. And perhaps the degreeing article by OMR.

Good Fortune!