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brawr's 1979 Kawasaki kz400


DAD

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One of the bits of this I've been putting off is dealing with the original seat pan. It was the worst part of the bike - the sponge in the seat must have been holding damp against it for a long time as it was junk:

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Finally motivated myself to bend a new one up. Getting the shape done was easy enough, but getting all the bracket mounting points at the right relative heights was a pain in the ain.

 

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Close enough. Excuse the wet paint, just tarted it up for the photo. Still needs some rubbers (lol) installed to allow it to rest nicely on the frame. Also need to rivet the cover on. Way better than it was though. Only needs to be good enough for a bit of use and a re-reg, then it'll get replaced with that Ali seat I posted earlier.

 

Had some little bits and bobs arrive from Dime City Cycles today, pleased! They will appear later on.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Bit overdue an update on this.

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JDM tyte.

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Finished the seat, not got any pictures of the underside but it fits up pretty well now. Just need to put the strap and buckles back on (ooh err).

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Popped the front end back together just to see how it would look, then back apart to get the bastard engine back in. Engine got a bit of a spruce while it was out, but nothing drastic. 

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Back end will go together this week (hopefully). Waiting on carb diaphragms before they go back on.

Started tapping a thread into my new right hand control yesterday to thread the throttle cable sleeve into, but the bastard aluminium cracked. Not particularly pleased about that, but have managed to transplant the internals into the old hand control housing for now.

Pretty pleased with progress overall.

 

Edited by brawr
failed at images
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  • 3 months later...

So I got a bit behind with the thread, oops.

Just going to do a bit of a photodump catchup:

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New braided brake line. Serviced front caliper with new piston and a seal kit at the same time.

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New repro carb diaphragms. This has twin Keihin CV carbs, and one of the diaphragms was split (pretty common problem apparently). Ran miles better after swapping these in.

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Had a crack at condensing all the electronics down into an under-seat box. Tiny gel battery means that the original battery tray (which was incomplete anyway) was unecessary. Got carried away. Also converted to blade fuses with some AliExpress goodies.

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Has gear, hurrah!

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Despite the stealth electronics box, I wasn't quite happy with the side profile. Had to keep factory airbox as apparently the CV carbs have a mare if you run them on pods, so the whole area was a little cluttered. Only had one side panel and it was damaged, so decided to make some simple ones up out of sheet to cover it up a bit.

ckvWpg9.jpg

Pretty happy with that.

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