Pretty Much Finished: Thanks for all the advice.

I never got around to posting a picture of my finished project and thought that maybe somebody would be interested. This is a 1980 KZ440B1 that I picked up from eBay for $290 a bit over three years ago, bidding against two breakers. It showed up in my driveway with no title, but I took it anyway, thinking that at the worst I could part it out. The bike came with apparent crash damage and the remnants of a vetter fairing. It took about a year to track down the owner of record (life got in the way)who told me that he had sold the bike several years before. I offered him $50 for his trouble if he'd go get a duplicate title (since he was the owner of record), and he did. I figure that whoever he sold the bike to crashed it immediately and never bothered to title it. It apparently sat in the corner of somebody's garage after that.

These things make cute little cafe racers if you open up the frame with pods and such, and that was kind of the original project idea. This forum turned me around on that, and I set out to build a basic little get around town scooter. Cleaned it, figured out how to rebuild a working airbox, rebuilt the carbs, changed out all of the cables, replaced brake parts, repaired a bunch of hacked up electrical bits, rebuilt the starter clutch and got it to run. That's the point at which I lost the rocker arm adjusting screw on the right side exhaust, most likely by not tightening it fully after adjusting. That actually makes quite a mess in a very short time.

Pulled the head off to see what was damaged. Other than a lot of carbon things looked good. So I took the head in for basic work and replaced the valve guide seals as long as it was apart. Didn't look at the rings, but the compression is good so I guess I lucked out.

The little bike runs pretty much exactly as you expect a small twin to run. Not much power, but it builds in a nice steady way. It accelerates well enough to be "quick" in town, but starts to run out of breath around 80MPH. Kawasaki claims a top speed of 100, but even new that would have taken a helluva hill and a strong tailwind, in my opinion.

The drum brake is the weakest part of the bike. It works and all, but isn't exactly predictable from stop to stop. With the stock-style kind of semi-knobbed tires it tended to wander around a little when braking over uneven pavement. Metric tires helped that and a fork brace helped some more.

The exhaust tape is purely cosmetic, since the original pipes were pretty nasty to look at. The seat was built by an upholsterer friend with improved foam on the stock pan. I was lucky in that the clutch, transmission and charging system were all working.

So, there it is. I could certainly wish for another couple of hundred cc's, but I got pretty much exactly what I wanted out of this project at only about twice my planned budget. I managed to do pretty much everything wrong, like changing out multiple electrical bits at one time, but it still worked.

I asked a lot of dumb questions here, but folks were nice to me even when I thought I knew what I was talking about but clearly didn't. So, thanks to all of you. I'll think of you on my way to the coffee shop in May.

wow she's a Cutie! Great Job!

Looks good! Ed