Kawasaki Sportsbike Riders Club - Australia - Online Forum

well......not *quite* spaghetti. The frame bracing around the steering head is actually quite massive - it's the actual frame spars back to the swingarm pivot area that are a bit......thin. - But that's not so bad really, because it is steel, not aluminium.

The ZX11 frame is basically just a bigger version of this old steel one, it follows much the same shape, but is made out of much bigger aluminium sections.

I am actually hanging out to ride this thing with a wicked demeanour 16" wheels 'n all.....

Fettucini then

yes, fetticini is a much better comparison !

Gos...looks like you are making some good progress already.
Good stuff!

I am all over this one like a fat cop on a donut mate.....

Have spent the last couple of nights printing out the entire microfiche for the '86 model - this is a great reference when putting things back together with all the exploded diagrams of each major bit. There are 60 individual pages for this model - when you print them out its 1 page with a big diagram and 1 page with all the relevant part numbers and prices. Out in the shed - referring to this is sometimes better than using the manual !

Gosling1 wrote: yes, fetticini is a much better comparison !

Prefer the Parpardelle (sp) myself, more surface area means it holds the sauce better.........opps wrong forum

wow some of the japlish is just hilarious !!!

Managed to clean up some of the original bodywork tonight - the entire OEM tailpiece is actually in really good nick paint-wise, so I have just polished it right up and will leave it at that. The stock tail-light came up nicely with a polish as well, and almost looks brand-new.

Both of the long side-cover panels have also polished up well, one of them is almost free of any scratches, while the other has a couple of smaller ones. These too, will just be polished and left alone.

The front mudguard has come up really nicely with a good polish, it has a few small blemishes across the lower part of the rear of the guard, but it will also be left alone after a polish.

All the old gasket material has now been removed from the sump and clutch covers. The motor will be getting a major clean this weekend, and the broken bits removed (clutch hub). Both tyres being removed on Saturday morning, so PC can kick off with preparation for painting.

Yeah, it's very rare for it not to be entertaining in some way by the time the bots bastardise it into english.

Put a few more hours into the build today......got the shitty old tyres removed at TJ's first thing this morning, and sorted out the 530-conversion bits with old mate at the tyre shop. He had a rear sprocket in stock, the front is one the way. It's not quite a 'bolt-in' conversion, but pretty close.

Stripped the rims of the original paint, and they are going over to Mick's (PC) tomorrow so he can get started on giving them a lick of 2-pack black.

A number of the smaller steel brackets and the side-stand were painted, have a couple more to do tomorrow including the centre-stand.

Both footpeg brackets and associated hardware were all detailed, they came up pretty nice.....

Tomorrow - will be spending time on the motor, replacing the clutch hub and sorting out all the cam-caps and miscellaneous engine bolts that currently sit in a box...

Hey Gos,

You still got room for the 7fiddy?

yes mate, always room for another bike here...... and a manual !

when do you want to bring her over ?

Ill give you a call shortly!

Oh, the manual, ummm yeah, i think i still have that one

Well I had another interesting day in the workshop today - raining for most of the day here, so it was a good place to be.....

I knocked up a clutch-holding tool, so the clutch hub-nut could be removed. These are generally torqued right up to buggery from the factory, and I was not sure if it had ever been undone before.......

Here is a picture of the holder. Basically, it is just 3 steel plates riveted together, with the 'holder' bit donated from a box of miscellaneous brackets. In a previous life, it had been a race-stand bracket




This is how it works in practice.....I have to be able to lock the shifting spanner against the workbench, so that when the pressure was applied to the hub nut (anti-clockwise), the clutch-holder was bearing down against the bench through the shifter - with the weight of the motor stopping everything from moving. I needed a pretty big breaker bar slipped over the ratchet handle, to get this fucker to move ! But move it did.....and off came the broken clutch hub....

This is a close-up of the holder in position....




and this is a wide shot showing how the whole shebang sits on the bench....




Once the OEM clutch hub was removed, I had a bit of a closer look at it, and the other complete clutch that came with this bike as spares.....

OEM hub - you can clearly see the 2 broken clutch-spring towers at the top of the picture....




and here is a shot of the rear of the OEM clutch hub......the reasons for including this will become clear shortly !




The OEM clutch hub looked basically identical to every other standard Kawasaki hub I have seen in the past, apart of course from the diameter and input-shaft spline pattern. The basic shape, spring towers and clutch springs/bolts, looked all very familiar....

Which was nothing at all like the other clutch hub !! This one has got me stumped.

It has exactly the same dimensions as the OEM hub, but looks nothing like it. It is a 2-part hub, the outer section has all the ridges which locate the steel plates, but this outer section slides over an inner section, where there are 3 ramp cutaways. It looks like some type of slipper-clutch or perhaps a back-torque limiting clutch ???? Fucked if I know really, it may well be a clutch hub out of either the ZX10 or even a ZX11 ? It fits exactly over the centre shaft, has the same spline pattern, same number of steel and fibre plates, the clutch springs are much longer and the spring-bolts are a 2-piece arrangement........here are some pics....

Unknown clutch hub outer section.



Unknown clutch hub inner section. You can clearly see the 3 sections where the small 'ramps' located on the inside of the outer section, locate here.



Here are the 2 sections together. The 3 small ramps in the outer section on the left are clearly visible....



This is a shot of the back of the unknown hub.....it looks nothing at all like the back of the OEM hub...




So there you go. I will need to have a good look through the ZX10 and ZZR1100 clutch pages on the KawasakiPartsWarehouse site, to try and work out what sort of clutch this is.....and what it belongs to ?

There are also some small detail differences in the spring pusher-plate......

OEM spring-plate. This one has 6 seperate cast holes for the clutch springs.....



Unknown spring-plate. This one has the 6 clutch-spring holes 'attached' in the casting to the plate....



Despite those detail differences, all the important dimensions are identical between the 2 plates, so I would assume that I should be able to use the complete unknown hub assembly in the engine, with some new friction plates and clutch springs.

It was a pretty interesting few hours mucking around with the clutch this afternoon......

Here are a couple more shots of some of the other things that are progressing. I stripped most of the paint from the wheels, but the paint on the cast part of the wheel is just not moving... - no drama, it will just get painted over. During the stripping process though, the outer rim edge and the edges of the 'spokes' came up really nicely - so I am in two minds now....wether to just go with the OEM style of paint on the wheels - ie, completely black with no highlights......or mask up the edges of the spokes and the outer rims, and just paint the inner hub and rim sections in black ?? It may not be OEM, but I think it would actually look pretty good.........not sure which way to go with this yet....

Rear wheel.




Front wheel




Finally - a shot of the bodywork which has been tidied up and polished. It's not 100% perfect, but it has come up really good I think, so I will be happy to use these panels just as they are. The photo really does not show how shiny these babies came up ......




I also sprayed the sump and the cam-cover with some gloss-black engine enamel today, they look much tidier as a result. Still cleaning old gasket material off the motor, and still have a lot of degreasing and cleaning up of the motor before I can start bolting things up to it. Made a decent start on the big box of miscellaneous engine bolts, and managed to locate all the cam-cap bolts, cam caps and a few other fittings......but I haven't found all the sump bolts yet !! Fucked if I know where they have gotten to.......

More to come next weekend ......

Like the illustration, like the project, like the tooling too... good work