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Z1 Enterprises has sold stainless steel fasteners for 10+ years. Some of you may remember 7-8 years ago we purchased the Dr Bolts / Net-Gap engine bolts business to bring the assembly of engine cover bolt kits in house to assure quality. Since then we've added more and more kits, more individual metric fasteners and other metric hardware.

As fasteners were scattered in categories that makes sense to motorcycle owners, but was confusing non-motorcycle customers. So... to help organize the fastener side of the business, we have just launched the DrBolts web site.
Dr Bolts Stainless Steel Metric Fasteners

Initially all the items on Dr Bolts web site are also on Z1 Enterprises, but as time goes by, more non-motorcycle fasteners will get added.

If you have any requests for items, we'd certainly be interested in hearing from you.

Hello Jeff! Marty from Buffalo here., Great news. I love stainless fasteners. And as we all know, the 10mm finer thread pitch 1.25 is so hard to find? But I hope People take notice of this. On this Kawasaki Thread!
Good Luck Jeff! And I am getting ready to order a small amount of stuff for 1 of my projects.

Take care and "ride on!" and safe of course!

Congrats Jeff and good luck with your new venture!

I'd like to see a good alternative to disc brake bolts for the '77 - 80' type wheels (maybe '76 too? 4 bolt pattern, M10, I think).

Also the long, correct bolts for the motor mounts are tough to find...especially the slightly longer version that used to come with case guards back in the day. Correctly shaped acorn nuts would be great but those seem impossible to find too unless they're OEM.

Cheers!

Mike

z1kzonly wrote: Hello Jeff! Marty from Buffalo here., Great news. I love stainless fasteners. And as we all know, the 10mm finer thread pitch 1.25 is so hard to find? But I hope People take notice of this. On this Kawasaki Thread!
Good Luck Jeff! And I am getting ready to order a small amount of stuff for 1 of my projects.

Take care and "ride on!" and safe of course!

They sure are, especially those that need to conform to the Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS). Those are the ones with the smaller hex head. I found M10x40 1.25 fine pitch JIS bolts (these have a 14mm hex head) in A2 stainless at www.wvsfasteners.co.uk/ in Great Britain, but those folks would not ship overseas. Those bolts are used to fasten the passenger footpegs on the KZ650 (and I suspect other KZ models), and because of the shape of the footpeg bracket the bolts with the larger normal hex head will not work. I was lucky to get a British member of another forum to send them to me. I don't know how difficult it would be for Z1E to acquire and stock JIS stainless bolts, but I am sure they would be the only vender in the USA that sold them. Ed

And as we all know, the 10mm finer thread pitch 1.25 is so hard to find? But I hope People take notice of this. On this Kawasaki Thread!

True, fine pitch stainless in certain sizes is very difficult to find and often custom made in small quantities. Some sizes are fine and even superfine pitch threads on these bikes. A major UK fastener supplier told me that it is because for most industrial applications high tensile steel is preffered for strength on very tight bolts. He got a batch of hundreds of M10 1.25 bolts custom made, but they were over £2 each.

The market won't bear the volumes needed to get the prices down. Also using stainless on brake parts is controversial as it has lower shear strength compared to steel.

You do need to be very careful using stainless steel where high torque or sheer stress can be placed on the fasteners.

Most commonly available s/s fasteners are A2-70 (aka 304 or 18/8). These have decent tensile strength, but shouldn't be used where they are subject to high stress (like brake rotor bolts or engine crankcase bolts).
There's a couple of key measures for steel - tensile strength and elastic limit (yield stress).

A2 has good tensile strength, but the limit for permanent stretch or bend is somewhat low compared to Alloy Steel (8.8).

We've had a few fasteners made for us - but it is problematic to find a place to run small quantities. Typically most special order bolts we've purchased require a minimum of 1,000 and often 5,000 to get sensible pricing. It's not easy to find a small shop in the USA as rolled threads (cheapest way to make the thread) require special equipment most machine shops don't own.

Perhaps the big bolt on the rear master cylinder on the KZ1000. Its a M14x1.00. I searched high and low and eventually found one from a 2012 dodge ram that I cut down and then plated.

There's a couple of key measures for steel - tensile strength and elastic limit (yield stress).


The shear strength being a function of the yield - I think around half of the yield strength on 304 stainless.
Some fasteners are in double shear, like the tourque arm bolts.

I have had stainless caliper bolts for years, controversial I know. Much more dangerous imo is some custom caliper mount plates, the stresses can be multiplied by bad design. Thinking of turning moments and resolution of the forces more than how to make things fit together is the way to go... also cast alloy as on fork leg caliper bolts holes is good in compression but weaker in tension.