Steering mis-aligned

He's saying loosen the fork tube clamps (lower and upper) triple tree clamps on the fork tubes.
If there's rotational tension they should rotate back into place with no clamp pressure on them...

OMG...


the fork tubes are twisted in the clamps!

Remove the wheel, and re-install the fork tubes and front wheel per your manual.

I have a very interesting development on this topic and I swear I'm not smoking anything funny while I write this....

So from all your suggestions, I first completely loosened the bolts on both the upper and lower triple clamps and freed up the tubes. This did not fix the problem right away so I tried twisting the tubes around and moving them up and down and nothing changed. So not knowing what else to do, I decided to remove the wheel and tubes and re-install them. I jacked up the engine to get the front wheel off but didn't realize that I had overdone it. And while I was still with the jack sitting on the left side of the motorbike, the vehicle just tipped over and fell to the other side to the right(luckily). My wife, hearing the loud thud, came running into the garage and helped me pick up the bike (I think there was hint of dissapointment on her face seeing me OK but that's a topic for a totally different forum :lol: ). And once the bike was up, drum roll please, the steering alignment issue had fixed itself.

My guess is since the steering handle had taken the brunt force of the fall, it jerked something back into place. Like I said before, there is evidence that the bike had taken a bad fall to the left front but this time the fall was on the right. Maybe it was still the twisted triples that got re-aligned or something else with the steering system but everything is perfectly aligned now. I'm not sure not to make of this but I immediately tightened all the bolts that I had loosened after making sure the tubes were at the correct height inside the clamps.

Luckily, I see no other damage from the fall. The carbs and gas tank were off the bike from the fall so they are safe. I guess I saved myself a ton of work by getting lucky but I would not recommend this to anyone obviously. However, it is disconcerting not to know the real reason for the misalignment. Any comments???

P.S: No comments on my sanity or sincerity of the topic will be appreciated.

You actually think we're not going to comment on this fix.... :blink: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

Freaking sludge hammer/slam the bitch to the ground fixes another KZ, awesome....

As for who-what... Had a bind somewhere throughout where once loosening all and the imapct :pinch: put things where they needed to be... go with that and be happy...

If you don't have a shop manual to give you torque settings for all the bolts one can be found for the 82 550 in the KZR file base, the index starts on page 307

I'm not sure what model the LTD is but you might find what your looking for on pages 228-235 or 294-297

If you didnt loosen the big bolt on top of triple tree and cinch bolt in front of tank it could still be in a bind,the axle clamps and fender could of also been holding it .
Make sure to torque the top bolt in triple tree and cinch down if it has any give things will twist again

This is why I tear down used bikes and reassemble myself.