'80 KZ550 Project

hey Lou,

I found a tail light, wondering if I could use it. The bulb only has two wires. red and black. I see in the wiring diagram I need a tail light wire, brake light wire and a ground. I looked at the bulb and there are two filaments. How would I go about hooking this up? does it ground through the body of the socket or would the black wire off of the socket be the ground?

I have a similar tail/brake. Yeah, the body of it is usually the ground. I just run a wire with a lug to one of the mounting bolts.
One wire will be for the bright filament. That is the brake.
The other wire will be dimmer. That is the tail.
On an 1157 bulb, the tail uses about .5 or .6 amp. The brake uses a little over 2 amps.

Frame grounds tend to be problematic so I always run a ground wire when possible.

Very nice job on the choke flap, by the way!

Well unfortunately I am back to no spark on 1&4...Ill start to do some ignition tests this afternoon but Im sick as a dog and pneumonia is wringing the life out of me.

went from 32*F roughly all week to 86*F!!! now get this, snow on tuesday.. snow. wonky weather out there.

Hope ya get better soon.

Yeah, it's spooky to be outside in March and it's near 90degF. And it's been like that (in the 80's) for a couple weeks. It's only supposed to be like 40 to 50.

When you get back to the bike;
Since you really have two ignition systems on a 4-cyl, you can troubleshoot by swapping parts or wires, and see if the problem follows a particular part.

First swap coils (by just swapping the small black and green wires) and see if the problem follows one coil.

On the pickups,
the black wire is positive, and the blue wire is negative for cylinders 1 and 4.

the yellow wire is positive, and the red wire is negative for cylimders 2 and 3.


If you swap them, and flip the rotor on the advancer by 180 degrees, the bike should still run.

If the coils are both good, and you swap the pickup wires and the problem stays on the same cylinders, it's the igniter.

You can try that HEI version in my sig.

Both coils are good. I swapped black and green wires on the coils and I still got spark.
I've been touching the pickup coils with a screwdriver and I get nothing from the 1&4. I put the green and black back. Even tried swapping the positive yellow/r even though they're the same wire.

I swapped black & yellow, then red & blue off of the pickups. I didn't get any spark on 2&3 but I was on 1&4 so this leads me
To believe the 1&4 pickup is toast.

I'm not overly frustrated because I'm still in mockup and im sick like a 200 pound baby lol but like I said it was 30*C and I could have use the wind against my face haha

I picked up a second job so I think it's almost safe to set some goals. In September, there is an all weekend bike event called the Wharf Rat Rally in Digby, Nova Scotia..I would like to be completed and have a few kms on it by then to work out any kinks and attend the show.

Thanks for all your help there Lou, much appreciated. Time to look for an ignition plate assembly!

Just as a confirmation, I would ohm out the pickups. Black to blue should be around 450 ohms.

Sometimes they only fail with heat, so you should hook up the meter and watch it while heating it with a blow dryer.

If you get another pickup plate, and one of those pickups is bad, even if it's the same one, I'm pretty sure you can just flip the good pickup and use it upside down.

Also, if you are rolling in cash , you can get a pickup plate for a KZ1000 police bike from Kawasaki, and just mount the pickups from that onto your existing plate.

Here's the details on how to re-assemble the magnets etc. and test polarity in case you take one apart.
home.comcast.net/~loudgpz/GPZweb/Ignitio.../PickupAndRotor.html

I hooked up the multimeter to the pickup coils and got 430 for one, 428 for the bad one.

I went ahead and ordered an ignition plate assembly from a kz1000 police bike off of the ol flea bay. 75 bucks later...Im still waiting for it to arrive haha.

I bought some rinky dink beehive turn signals and mounted them to the bolt that runs through my fender struts. I still need a license plate bracket. Friend of mine suggested to use two RED beehives for blinkers/tail/brake lights....doh! They were only $2.50 a piece so I could just pick up some others but then would have to change out the sockets and it would be pointless by then.

I used to have those same turn signals. You could just get the ones with red lenses and swap out the lenses, but the problem I found with those fixtures is that they were not bright enough. You can't really fit a full size bulb in there, but maybe with an LED bulb it may be brighter.

If I recall, they only have one circuit so it wouldn't be easy to make them tail/brake/turn signals.

I would just run them as turns and use another tail/brake fixture like you planned.

I've seen bikes using two small lights for tail/brake/turn on either side of the fender, and I wasn't crazy how it looked. They seemed too far apart.

I was thinking quick and easy where to mount them. I could integrate them into my axle covers...I got ideas for my front signals.Involves an old pontiac hood emblem I found in the ditch haha. the worst ehh? Ill have to work on it a bit more before I take pics.

r.i.p crappy tire welder, so for now I may have to run down to phils, slide him a coffee or two

I like the Hobart Handler 140 wire-feed for the price. But it's 120v. It does have gas capability and comes with regulators etc. ... Just need a tank.

I've only used flux core so far, but may get some CO2 in the future.

I moved the signals down to the axle plate covers. I think I'll leave them there if the law lets me.
I need to get my hands on some acrylic or lexan for my front signals now.