SPREADING THE SICKNESS!!

I've been after my buddy to get a motorcycle for some time. Today he called me up and told me about a bike for sale a couple blocks from his house. I saddled up and rode over to lend an experienced eye...

Long story short: $200 later, he's the new owner of a 1982 Spectre 750! The title's clean, paint's decent, tires are good, battery's good, all the lights work, electrical system seems to be okay.

The downside? The top end is in boxes!

The previous owner was having problems with low compression, figured he had problems with the rings and took it to some hotshot motorcycle mechanic. The mechanic told him he had bent valves and quoted him $1200 to rebuild the top end. (Basically, the mechanic didn't want to mess with it.) So the owner brought the bike home and took it apart, lost interest, and put a FOR SALE sign on it.

Near as I can tell, none of the valves are bent. The spring retainers are off, but the valves were still in the head and I was able to spin all the valves and push them in and out freely, no restrictions or hangups. I think the guy just didn't realize that he had to adjust his valve clearances! All the shims were stuck to the undersides of their buckets, I don't think the dude even knew about them...

My buddy had to leave for San Antonio for a few days, so I didn't have time to inventory all the parts before we locked it all away in his garage, but as soon as he gets back I'll try to get some pictures to share with you guys.

Good deed!

That Spectre is a lot like your KZ750H, except for the shaft drive and paint. When you two get the Spectre running, how about giving us all an impression of the differnce between the two bikes when riding. I presume it will run quieter and with less vibration, but it is worth a comparison test.

Sweet! Another mind corrupted.

Ahem...


PICTURES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Damn, I need something like that to happen to me. I wanna get SICK in a bike kind of way...

It shouldn't take too long to get it back together, let me know if I can help.

By the way Justin, we might be having another "bike night" this weekend, Sat. or Sunday evening. Check the Yahoo group for info.

autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/vjmcok/

Kent

JUN 03, 2006 02:06 PM

Going today to sort and itemize parts (plus drink beer and float in the pool and grill steaks). I had my buddy take the head to his car mechanic to soak in a vat to remove carbon deposits in the combustion chambers, hopefully that should be ready.


JUN 06, 2006 01:57 AM

So far so good, the only missing piece is one wrist pin retainer circlip.

We had a great time, swilling Jim Beam & Coke and scrubbing engine parts in gasoline. At one point my buddy had to go around the side of the garage and yack, but then he came right back got to work. We dropped the oil pan and were concerned about all the sparkly sludge in the bottom until we realized it was sparkly because of the gold paint used on and inside the engine cases.

Why would Kawasaki paint the inside???


JUN 15, 2006 4:04 am

The Perfect End To A Perfect Day!

I think I could spend a whole day in a motorcycle salvage yard, looking at all the bikes, wondering about the stories behind each of them. Every bike there was loved by someone. I feel like there's little bit of a magical residue overhanging a motorcycle boneyard. It's kind of bittersweet...

So my buddy, Action Man and I went looking for parts for his project bike, came away with a decent looking stock exhaust system and a center stand. We got it back to his house and hit the chrome pipes with some polish and elbow grease and WOW! It shines like a diamond in a goat's ass! We really got lucky with this one. It's not all burned up or rusted, and even though it came from a different model and year Kawasaki, it fit perfectly! It's funny because all the hardware on his bike is black, but now it has this shiny chrome exhuast system. Okay, maybe that's only funny to me...

I've considered changing my screen name to oldbikegeek...

Anyway, after we put all the tools away we enjoyed some of Action Man's incredible steaks and a delicious beverage. He's known for grilling steaks, and today when he was at my house I loaded the back of his truck up with a dead peach tree. It died last year, but I just recently cut it down. He usually throws some pecan twigs on the coals in the grill, which makes for a nice steak, but the wood from the peach tree made the steaks sooooo good!

Then we watched a DVD:



All in all, this has been one of the best days in recent memory. Maybe I'm just easily amused, I dunno...


Mon Jun 19, 2006

Ahhhhh, I've had a excellent weekend! Two days putting my buddy's motorcycle together, drinking beer, floating in the pool, and eating well: I've had ribeye steak three times in the last two days!

We swapped the front end, putting my old LTD fork on his bike. I rebuilt it not long before I switched to the Ninja fork I'm using now, so it's all fresh and works great. We'll change the seals in his Spectre fork after we get the bike running. We also worked over the rear shocks and replaced the broken center stand.

I lapped the valves and installed them with new stem seals using the valve spring compressor I made. I love these old KZ 750 motors, they're simple and stout, a real clean design.

How about you guys, what'd you do this weekend? Did you remember your dad?


JUL 01, 2006 10:03 AM

We're in the home stretch now!

Last weekend we honed the cylinders and installed the pistons in the block, then lowered the block onto the connecting rods and hooked them up, installed the cam chain guides then put the head on and snugged two of the head bolts to compress the gasket sealer at the back of the base gasket.

Yesterday I received four diaphragm slides, since Action Man melted a hole in one of his diaphragms when he hosed his carbs with spray cleaner. The four that I got yesterday are actually my old slides, hahaha! I switched from Keihin carbs to Mikunis last year, and traded my original carbs to a buddy in Seattle for his old pair of Icon Timax gloves. He used the carb bodies I sent him, and sent me back the slides... along with another set of Mikunis! At my urging, he'd picked up a set of BS34s from a GPz750 on eBay. He never did get the Miks to work, so he sent them to me. This set of Mikunis is different from the set I have, these have big curved cutouts on the bottoms of the slides. I figure I'll drop them into my carbs and see what happens...

Anyway, there's a possibility that we'll have my buddy's bike running this weekend, maybe even today. The main thing that might hold us back would be if we can't get the valves shimmed like they need to be. House of Kawasaki will be closed until next Wednesday, so if we need to get some different shims, we'll need to get them today... and HoK is like 60 miles away...

Wish us luck!


JUL 08, 2006 04:17 AM

WARNING: BORING TECHNICAL SH*T TO FOLLOW.

I feel like asssss. Every time I go to my buddy's house and work on his bike, I suffer for it. It's great fun, and I love working on motorcycles, but I'm all about the snap crackle pop today, my hands feel like they're broken. It's the bending and stooping and crouching over the motorcycle and using my hands for sh*t like trying to wrestle the airbox boots onto the backs of the carburetors. There's a reason I trashed my stock airbox and went with filter pods: I can pull my carbs off my bike in about a minute. Actually, I know it's not working on the motorcycle that's doing this to me, it's the lupus. I think I'm going to have to go back on the prednisone. I go back to the doctor the 17th for another MRI on my hands...

So I was right to suspect the cam chain tensioner, it wasn't tensioning. I pulled it back apart and worked it over, and when I reinstalled it and released the lock bolt I could hear this sexy snick! that told me it was actually working now.

I checked the timing again, but it was dead on perfect, I got it right the first time.

I got the thing to start, but I had to use quite a bit of persuading fluid spray.

I caught the bike on fire at one point.

The float level was too high in a couple of the carbs, so they were drooling gas onto the case, so when the bike backfired through the carbs there was this WHOOMP and the bike was on fire! I huffed and I puffed and blew the fire out, cleaned out my pants and got back to work.

So we worked on some other stuff. I cleaned and lubed the petcock and locking gas cap assembly. There are a lot of parts in that damned gas cap, little springs and sh*t, and remembering the fiasco I went through on my birthday last year with my gas cap refusing to unlock at a crucial time, forcing me to break the f*cking thing off, it's obvious why I wanted to fix up the cap on my buddy's bike. Action Man borrowed some muriatic acid from his neighbor and cleaned the rust out of his gas tank.

Tomorrow I go back and pull the head, pull the valves out and start over. The reason the bike is running so sh*tty is a lack of compression, and that's cause by the valves not closing all the way. I'm going to try moving the valves into different spots on the head and measure valve stem height to see if they fit any better (all the parts got mixed up, so I couldn't know which valve came out of which hole, which piston was originally in which cylinder, etc. I have the thinnest shims I can get on there now, so that means grinding the valve stems to get more clearance. If that doesn't work, we'll have to pull the valve seats and install new ones.

Pretty involved sh*t there...




JUL 24, 2006 11:08 PM

Post mortem on the valves: Three bent intake, one bent exhaust. I think they were a little dinged up before, like borderline, but with the cam chain tensioner failure they're for damn sure bent now!

An internet buddy in Kansas has shipped me 8 straight valves. I lapped them in yesterday and measured stem height, figured out we need to get 0.020" ground off the stems to get back within spec.

Cross your fingers!


JUL 30, 2006 05:04 AM

Now... with PICTURES!

Ahhhh, another grand day of working on Action Man's old bike! I arrived about 1:00, determined to change the steering head bearings and clean out the braking system. I didn't get to do more than remove the front calipers and master cylinder because the bearings turned into a career! It took two solid hours of carefully controlled violence with a hammer and chisel to remove the bottom bearing race from the steering stem, then the tapered races inside the steering head took another couple hours to remove. We don't have the special tools the mechanics at the dealership use, so I had to survey the contents of the property to see what was available that would work. I finally used a drill bit extender, basically a slender steel rod about a foot long to catch the edge of the race. Installing the new bearings was both easy and extremely satisfying!





Instead of getting into the brakes I disassembled the headlight / instrument cluster so I could clean and inspect everything and Action Man could freshen up the black paint on the various pieces.




Along about sunset, Action Man shifted into Grill Master mode and we had a fantastic dinner! My mouth still waters to think of it... Tonight was a little over the top with a nice thick steak, marinated shrimp, bratwurst, Samuel Adams Boston Lager, and Neko Case's new album at an authoritative volume level.










AUG 11, 2006

Here I'm making some widget covers aka smog port block off plates:







Thu Aug 17, 2006

Now I have proof of the existence of Action Man! An actual photograph of the palooka in question:



Last weekend:

Here's Action man's bike when I arrived at his house.




I've replaced the oil seals in the fork tubes, and now we're ready to put oil in them and reinstall. Here's me trying to inject oil into the air inlet. (Dumb idea, we wound up just taking the bolt out of the bottom and pouring in from the bottle.)



We then proceeded to work over his front brakes.
Here's Action Man in action:



And here's how his bike looked when I left:




As usual, he grilled up a delicious dinner. This week it was king mackerel filets from a fish that he'd caught last time he was in the Gulf of Mexico. I'm not usually that crazy about fish, but I suspect that this guy could take a crap on his grill and it'd be delicious...



After dinner we played some guitar:



Action Man has some pretty guitars, though I'm not that crazy about Stratocasters. I'm more of a Telecaster man, myself...



Then a dip in the pool before calling it a night. The swimming pool has been a real blessing, it gets damn hot in that garage!



Yesterday, we took a trip to House of Kawasaki in Oklahoma City. I sat out on the loading dock under some shade and measured valve clearance, then unbolted the cams and moved the shims around, then trading the shims we had for those of the proper thickness, finally wound up with all of the valves set at about the correct clearance: more or less about 0.15mm between the cam and the bucket.



This is a shot from before the shimming, you can see there's WAY too big of a gap there, almost 1mm too much.

The next step is to bolt the head onto the cylinder block, hook up the carbs and start the f*cker!



Today in pictures...

Action Man should be happy with that bike. Looks nice and clean.$200.... Nice

We still have a lot of fine tuning to do, and we're trying to do it on the cheap which creates it's own set of challenges, but I was able to take it around the block a few times this evening. Man, that thing really wants to go! It's going to make a great bike for him when we're all done with it.

Wow Justin, I didn't know you were so busy! That is a nice looking ride you guys fixed up. And that food is awsome looking, I'm starving for a steak right now, thanks a lot buddy .

Can't wait to see it, when you guys making the next ride? Last night we rode out east to Dixie Diner, somewhere on NE23, can't remember where were going Saturday night.

You're probably eating grilled steak again Saturday and swimming, drinking whiskey and cokes, Sam Adams, huh, huh?

Catch ya later

Kent

Hopefully I'll be dragging my friend out to Bike Nite sometime within the next month or so. He's ordering new carb holders and airbox hoses from Jeff Saunders today, that'll help with the air leaks...

Another milestone today: This is the first time Action Man and I have gone for a ride together on our bikes! We cruised around on the back roads outside of town, had a blast!

(Mine's the black one...)








Towards the end we stopped and switched bikes. Totally different experience! I'm gonna start calling his bike The Barcalounger! It's so quiet and smooth and laid back, the polar opposite of mine!

Reckon this thread so be moved to the "project" forum? Looks like a great cantidate.

wiredgeorge wrote:

Reckon this thread so be moved to the "project" forum? Looks like a great cantidate.

Sure man, make it so.