The Friendship Bike - NobleHops restores a 75 Z1

Had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Nils Menten today at a swap meet in Phoenix. The KZR T-shirt always attracts the right kind of attention
Nils does some very tidy vapor blasting. Makes me want to rip my motor out and have it vapor blasted. Good talking to you sir, we will do business together in the future I am sure of it.

kaw-a-holic wrote: Had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Nils Menten today at a swap meet in Phoenix. The KZR T-shirt always attracts the right kind of attention
Nils does some very tidy vapor blasting. Makes me want to rip my motor out and have it vapor blasted. Good talking to you sir, we will do business together in the future I am sure of it.

Likewise Jon! Great chatting with you and I'm glad we met! Looking forward to following your build!

N.

HOORAY!

Logjam broken. I have been hunting and buying transmission parts, still waiting for roller bearings to arrive from Partzilla, but in the interim I spotted an entire transmission on eBay from Sichley Motorsports. They reported it was from a bike with ~20K miles, and it was really clean and looked to be in excellent condition. I could not however see the gear dogs from 5th to 2nd, and they had already warehoused it so it couldn't be easily photographed. For $130 I decided, "why not", bought it and it arrived yesterday. It looks near-new, was apparently never raced or ridden hard. The critical dogs are nearly unmarked. That's my winner, I am going to put this in in its entirety and save the other trans and parts for the second Z1, when it gets its turn.

I am deep into cleaning and derusting 5 SOHC and DOHC Honda tanks this week, and wrestling with power and equipment issues for the vapor blaster, but next week I will get after this engine reassembly in earnest.

Stay tuned!

N.

Hey Nils.....any update on the Z?

Stev-o wrote: Hey Nils.....any update on the Z?

Why yes Stev-o!

Well hello there fellas.

Pardon the delay, we got super busy here on customer work (WE MUST NOT SPEAK OF WHAT WE DO FOR MONEY IN THE OTHER HALF OF THE SHOP OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES), and the poor Z1 got put on hold for a bit, but that stuff is OVER . This bike needs to be done in a month when my buddy arrives for a tour here in the southwest, and we're back into it this week.

Catching you up, we found some manky gears/dogs in the transmission, punted on those and sourced a replacement set of gears, some new bearings and bushings, and an entire transmission, in much better condition overall. So I opted to put the whole transmission in this bike, and kept the other parts to refurbish another transmission when I get into the second Z1.

So today I (literally) dusted off the cases, reminded myself where I left off, and I assembled the crankcase.

Everything went well - I went slowly and checked a lot of stuff twice, had some fun scratching my ass about why the trans would not shift to second till I was reminded of the neutral finder, satisfied myself that I had everything installed correctly, and buttoned up the crankcase. I did replace the needle bearings on the transmission and one of the bushings, plus the clutch basket bearing. With a skosh of lubrication everything turned super freely and felt great.

Had one minor head scratching moment installing the kickstarter shaft I'd appreciate some feedback on: The manual says to turn the shaft clockwise a full turn bnefore installing the spring, and I could see that there is a pawl and a steel stop on the crankcase. Figured what they were after was to rotate the shaft till the pawl hit the stop, and THEN install the spring into the locating hole in the shaft. So I did, but of course the hole was about 180 degrees from the spring end with the shaft in this rotated position. Figuring that the purpose was to more or less cock this spring with the shaft in the proper position, I grabbed the free end of the spring, rotated it 180 degrees and inserted it into the shaft, then slipped the allow spring guide into place, no problem, but as soon as I let go, of course the spring pulled it back the 180 degrees to where it was. This all makes sense to me, but I thought I'd run it by you guys. Is this the proper way to install this? Here's a photo of the finished result.



EDIT: This photo is NOT CORRECT. Read on in this thread.

More...

Second question for tonight.

This starter idler gear - is that shaft supposed to sit proud 12mm or so like this?

Last question for tonight. This all went together easily, but I found some old thread that suggested that replacing these three springs might be a smart idea. Opinions?

And finally, some photos of the rebuild, just because I know you enjoy them:

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Great work
Love the pics