TOPIC:

Your a complete lunatic!!!! Well told story and funny as hell..way to stick with it bro... Pat

Sheeesh what a PIA. Phosporic acid works in hours or a day. Glad u did it Wrench and not me

Tirefire Pat wrote: Your a complete lunatic!!!! (snip)...

Hey! I resemble that remark!
Well, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but I'm tenacious as hell and won't give up.

R,
I am actually glad I did it too. I've done all the other formats of tank cleaning/sealing lots of times on old cars but never tried this. It was fun if entirely unpractical. The only way I could see this approach as useful (to motorcycle tanks specifically) is if your tank had only minor surface rusting internally and mainly near the front filler neck. Anything else or more severe and yeah, go with acid and sealer.
KZombie's original parts list is not long; I wanted to try this approach just so I can say "and look! It's the original tank still. Isn't it beautiful?"

One thing I did come to appreciate through all this electrolysis investigating is: plating. As in nickle or what have you. You can essentially clean original hardware (assuming it's not entirely ruined) and then using the same procedure but with slightly different materials (swapping the iron/steel out) plate your hardware / fasteners. It's basically the same thing going on. I'm close enough to the finish line now that I may just try it on a few bolts and nuts where the chrome is chipped (ahem ) or pitted. Why not? The whole thing only needs to be a little bigger than a cup size. Way less mess than dinkin' with a 33 gallon tub. Then I can say "and look! Those are the original bolts holding the handlebar on!" too

Your doing a fantastic job wrench, really enjoying your build. If you can this is the guy you want to buy gaskets from. Super cool guy I have actually met him since we both live in AZ. Quality gaskets, Steve West with attest to this as well.

stores.ebay.com/jaquishmotorsports/?_dmd=2&_nkw=kz+650

Always good material, if damaged in route he sends a new one, ships immediately and good prices. Nice man too.
Tell Stan Steve says hi.
Steve

Tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday,
- John Wayne -

Well, who am I to argue with The Duke?

I had a few hours on my hands last week between risky, unworthy moments of near electrocution and a recent shopping list of parts had begun to pile up so while the tank was be blasted with electrons I set to putting more of KZombie together. I found a good deal on complete stainless steel, brake line kit on eBay and was pleased with the results:


These brake lines were optionally colored with various options for the banjo fittings and the lines so I got real creative and chose black and black. The kit was complete with all washers and new bolts and I was able to install all four lines in about 30 minutes. It felt like it should have gone faster but I found the banjo fittings were pressed on being ... parallel to the opposite end and this presented a little more challenge when installing the line from front Master Cylinder because the stainless line wouldn't twist much. I did finally get it though.
Next I got to installing the throttle cables and routing some of the forward control wiring. Basically anything that came off the handlebars was run. This allowed me to finally get the clutch cable installed and the engine cover on the left buttoned up. Incredibly, this went smooth as silk and I was grateful for being so A-type when I dismantled KZombie almost 10 years ago as I labelled the crap out of every connection, electrical or mechanical. The clutch feels good though. A tiny amount of "free play" in the lever before I can feel it engage the clutch and squish the pressure plate.
Looking like a rider in for service more than restoration:


Next up was the bank of carburetors...
Is it just me, or do y'all think they made this process entirely too difficult? I have always struggled with installing the carbs. It soooo feels like that old saying - "trying to stuff 10 pounds of potato into a 5 pound sack.". Well, this was no different than any other set of carbs and was reluctant and caused a lot of sweating. Finally, almost about to concede at the 75th yard line, I opted to pull the intake boots back inside the air box, thereby making lots of room to struggle further with the carb bank and press them into the carb mounts. Later, I wiggled the intake boots back out of the air box and onto the carb's intakes:


I know that there is almost always a thread on this forum regarding "air box or pods?" and of course there's lots of folks on either side of this fence but I'm gunna toss my hat into the ring here and say just one thing about it - Those carb boots between the air box and carb intakes? They're as much inside the air box as outside between the air box and carb. Brilliant Einstein! So what's my point? Well, it occurred to me that the shape and overall length of these boots must be making them perform as basically a rubber velocity stack. No? I mean when you see the boots in your hands, they're shaped like velocity stacks. Thus, my thinking is that they must also act as velocity stacks to each carb. No? I know that with all my automobile pursuits, having velocity stacks installed was one more way to increase performance of said carb; swirling and accelerating the air flow into the carb's throttle body is a performance enhancement. No?
Anyway. I'm sure this may stir up more dust in the air box vs pod debates but I'm kinda' thinkin' those genius minds at Kawasaki's skunk works knew what they were doing when they designed these little, albeit aggravatingly tight boots for the carbs.

Stepping back from my beautiful machine as it comes rises further from the grave:


You might notice that now KZombie is sporting a new chain. Yup. I stuck with stock sized gearing and chain but did run into the snag of the master link. Turns out that during my absence from motorcycles, the overall thought of a master link clip (I have been told it's actually called a "conifer link/clip"?) has been changed out to a rivet style master link. Sadly, I do not possess a rivet tool and so even though the chain is fully installed and tension set, the master link will have to make a truck-ride visit to Waco Motorsports at some point to have that master link rivet tool put to use. I've seen lots of EweToob videos at this point on how to crimp or peen the master link rivet yourself with various home brew methods or tooling and I even tried one method involving tubing flare bit and a simple C-clamp but I must be stupid because I can't get it to work and rather than screw-up a perfectly new chain or risk the chain flying apart at speed. I'm just going to pass on this particular bit and leave it to a shop with the right tool.

In and about this time, I had managed to install a few more bits like the side stand finally. I also added the required oil to the engine and my replacement valve cover gasket arrived so I installed it, greased the new allen head bolts with anti seize and torqued them down to that careful point where my wrist clicks
Incredibly, KZombie still has the entire emissions setup but since I wasn't putting it back on, I chose to take a short segment of the original air hose/plenum and install it between the two reed valves and secure it with the stock original clips:


Yeah. That sure as hell ain't pretty but it is an original part so I'm happy with it!
I turned my focus to the exhaust side of the equation next, since the intake side was mostly buttoned up (still have to plug the hole in the air box where the emissions system was. I have a rubber plug/bung that fits it and was planning to use it.)
As you may recall, the exhaust system for KZombie looked really good once I gave it a vigorous bath and rub down with quad-0 steel wool but sadly, the loose mud dauber nests bouncing around inside the mufflers turned out to be the muffler internals themselves. Chunks of the baffles were rusted free and loose
Serendipitous timing for a "1978 KZ650 exhaust system, complete", on the List Von Craig turned up in Austin recently and drove down and picked it up. Well, it was a good price I thought and original part and in pretty good shape. Truth be told, KZombie's mufflers looked better in the chrome department but these ones were functional and so I slapped them on:


You can see the forward ends of the exhaust are pretty worn but it'll be good enough to get the old beast running. At some point I am going to replace it entirely with a new 4-into-2 chromed exhaust.

Don't you just love the wiring diagrams for machines? I mean, I've done miles of wiring in all kinds of vehicles and consider myself very good at it but I still have to laugh at the diagrams (schematics are even more misleading). Everything looks so obvious. So neat. So unlike the reality.
THIS IS REALITY:


THIS IS THE DIAGRAM:


Another John Wayne quote is in order here - "Life is tough but it's tougher when you're stupid." - John Wayne -
These wiring diagrams always make me feel smart but then the reality of the wiring loom makes me feel stupid. Compounding this whole mess is the inconsistencies found in these diagrams. I have three different manuals for KZombie - FSM, Clymer and Haynes. Every one of them has subtle but often as it turns out significant differences between them.
Keep in mind, that all these diagrams are assuming a bone stock, original parts used situation. KZombie was anything but bone stock with original parts. More like bare stock with mainly original crap left over that the PO chose to ignore or just plain didn't know was a problem.
The ignition key is a perfect example. I have three examples now of ignition key switches. Everyone listed as "KZ650 Ignition Key Switch" too. I mean, it was right there in black and white on the internet so it must be true; right?
That's another thing I've learned in this restoration - I SUCK at online shopping!
Ultimately, to button up the entire wire loom, I had to go with a new "Emgo" key switch even while knowing other perfectly sane members of this forum chose to get rid of it (the aftermarket switch) because there were problems getting it to work. It did take some doing but I was finally successful force-feeding KZombie to work with an aftermarket switch. As it turns out, the diagram - all three of the applicable diagrams in all of my manuals - had one thing in common with regard to the ignition switch. A single, out of loom, brown wire which the new, aftermarket, Emgo switch does not have. I had to squint a little more and analyze the legends on one of my diagrams (personally, I prefer the Clymer because is it rendered in full color) and break out the multimeter but I got it figured out. It required the slightest modification to the new switch's wire-to-connector, a splice of sorts. I had to also acknowledge the wire colors were not the same and deduce the changes but I did.
So it was on to another newly arrived part. The ignition coils:


Pretty straight forward I guess. Thankfully, the colored primary leads are hard to screw-up and other than leaving the HT leads at full length for the time being, it's done.
All that was left was to install the battery and test out my handy super-sleuth work. Of course that went sideways because my battery while new, was not charged and my battery charger was committed to electron bombardment duty with my tank

Onto one of the last things in my shortening list of tasks - the seat. You can see in the first pictures of this thread what the original seat looked like... yeah, pretty much a horror show. I broke out the razor knife and had at it. Spared nothing it gutting the seat back to it's pan for which I had already ordered a new seat "kit" with foam and cover. It's not a stock looking seat and I reckon most of you will say "WTF are you thinking?" when you ultimately see my seat finished but it had a few things going for it which I find attractive:
(1) - I could afford this option.
(2) - It provides a slightly lower seating position than stock
(3) - I SUCK at online shopping (or did I already mention this?)
Number 3 is the main reason I chose the seat kit I did because I found a near perfect, original KZ650 seat on eBay and I really wanted it but it was an auction and not a [Buy it now] sale. Of course when the time came for the auction to end, I was at work, up to my elbows in another restoration and totally forgot. It didn't matter anyway because the auction went way up over my budget.
So back to my original pain, I mean, pan. No I mean pain:


Ain't that a beaut? Ah heck, it's only going to need a little buffing and should be good to go; no?
Back to the drawing board. I already have the seat kit on it's way and it's made to fit the stock pan. I checked my pan options online and they're pretty much non existent. Closest was an eBay seat which looked good but reading the fine print said "pan is damaged beyond use as the seat was ripped off the bike frame". Doh!
Thus, the seat is going to, for lack of a better term, take a back seat for now. I'll cut up some steel and fabricate the side sections which are so important to a seat recover because they contain all the cleats or points which secure the new cover. KZombie's scheduled rise from the dead just has to slide back a bit.

The weather here has been up and down like a toilet seat of late. Some days are awesome and perfect for painting while other days I don't even want to step foot in the garage due to the heat index or humidity but I have plugged a few minutes daily into the tank and skins in prepping for paint. These will all someday be metallic blue (the darker, stock-esque, color blue). The tank by this point was outta the electron bath and I commenced to body working it. The tank had been "pinched" - usually the result when a rider says something to the effect "What this!" and shortly after, things don't go as planned and they're body constricts like a boa around a field mouse. KZombie was no exception. I have a dent puller in my shop which I used on the tank 10 years ago and got most of the minor/easy dents out but one of the two pinches (right side) was reluctant to pull out. The weld-on anchors would simply rip off. Yet the dent was still too deep for just slapping body filler on it so I developed a method which I used on cars before. It's akin to leading (as in lead sled body working) but I use my MIG welder. Drawing short lines of weld along the deepest area of the dent on KZombie's tank to essentially fill the dent with steel instead of bondo. Of course this tank had the added need to fill in all the pimple sized pock marks all over from the rust pitting too. I have to say of all the phases of automotive restoration, the one I groan the most about is body working. Sanding. Ugh! Still, it's a necessary evil:


The tank is about 95% ready in this pic. I missed a small pock mark up front there and the back is a subtle flat spot. It's always been my method to smear the panel from front to back with bondo and then sand back, what doesn't belong. I have found that approach most successful personally, versus spot puttying here and there and here and there. Unless you are a genius at mixing body filler consistently then spot puttying is difficult because some spots will be harder than others and when you block sand it, the harder areas wear down slower and ultimately (again, in my experience only) I end up with a wavy panel. So just smear the whole dang side and then sand off all that isn't needed. You can see the bondo is less than the thickness of a credit car in most places.

Well, the tank being finally into body working phase meant my battery charger was liberated from evil duty and I filled KZombie's battery with acid and got it charged and installed into the bike. Yay! So close. So close!







Ba da bing. Ba da Boom!
Lights and action!
I had to replace the old flasher relays of course and new bulbs and a slight custom change to the front turn signals which are currently only signals and not running lights too. This will change later as I have the bulb holders that support both running and turn but the holders were not present when I found KZombie and so it's been a collecting of absent bits thing. The front turn signal housings are made for a late model (I think it said 90's era) Kawasaki so they look the same but must be for a European market.
The only things KZombie hasn't done electrically yet is:
- beep it's horn (don't have one of those yet)
- charge it's battery (engine hasn't run yet)
- make bang in the suck,squish,bang,blow spaces (engine hasn't run yet)
Pretty short list of things it has yet to do though and I'm happy.

I'm waiting on the seat and I still need some fuel line, vacuum line and fuel filter bits which are kinda' tied in part to one other bothersome problem I discovered - the petcock -
I pulled the petcock outta the tub, wrapped in a baggie and on the baggie is a note to myself (my 10 year ago self wrote this) "Needs diaphram and diaphram spring, all other seals replaced. Saweet. Thank goodness I labelled the crap out of all these parts so long ago! So I hopped online and applied my shit-at-best online shopping skills... FAIL.
I cannot find a rebuild kit for this petcock which includes the diaphram spring. Even when the picture shows a spring amid all the seals, the advert later says "stock image" or similar and the verbal description does not say "diaphram spring". Dare I buy it anyway and ASSuME that the kit will actually contain a part it specifically doesn't say it has?
So I changed track and thought maybe I should just replace the whole shootin' match. Search for "1979 Kawasaki KZ650C Petcock" and see what you find. I found lots of results and how sweet it is many of them were cheap. Like I'm talking under $20 cheap! Woot!
BUT (always has to be a frikken but butt)
Then in the fine print (BTW, Thanks Steve for pointing out you should always read the fine print in online adverts!) and see that the mounting holes for all these damn petcocks are 34mm c/c. So I go out and check my petcock. Hmmm? It's mounting holes are 44mm c/c. WTF over?

Stumped again by the simplest of things and while hoping for some insight from the good men and women here on the forum, I decided last night to finish up what I could - the brakes needed bleeding:







Nice! I actually got another task checked off the list without brain boggling problems or disaster. The front calipers are actually holding the original brake pads that I extracted from them. They look to have been barely scuffed while the rear pads were nearly worn down to the backing plates. I bought a complete brake pad set but ultimately chose to leave the originals up front and only replace the rear pads. All the calipers were rebuilt and so far (not under any real riding conditions or loading) all are working great. They bled out and hold pressure. The front MC is a new unit as KZombie's front end was pirated for most all of it's useful stuff including the front MC which was just cut off the hydraulic line. The inidignity this poor bike must have suffered through all those years ago.

So she's a stopper now. With fingers crossed and a wee bit more time, I'm hoping to make her a goer too!
Until next week my KZR colleagues!

Great stuff as always Wrench! You are getting close. I used walking cane end caps on the reed valve ports. They work great in vinyl and do not melt. 97 cents. Also on 550 carb and air box install, i have a video out here on the process. The best thing to keep in mind is that the 550 airbox shifts not only back but up quite a bit if you take the stays off. Greasing the front intake runners on the outside with keep you from blowing out a vertebra trying to pull them off and on too. My method 1. raise airbox back and up, 2. slide the greased carb bank in under the box tubes, 3. fit carbs to holders, 4, bring air box tubes close and gently use a flat angled pick to place each air box tube on the carb inlets. I got down to 5 minutes or so and much less effort needed. All this improvement after only the fifteen gazillionth removal. R

Greetings fellow KZR's

It's still not too late to in this part of the country to wish y'all a Happy Father's Day!
It was a great Dad's day at my house but I'll get to that in a minute.
First the details and pics of the past week's efforts on KZombie which carried on with the tank's body work. I think I've mentioned previously my absolute love for block sanding haven't I? No? Well, I lied. I hate it. I hate it even more when it's near triple digits outside which is where I have to do all the block sanding. Still I persisted and finally got to what looked acceptable and ready for priming and paint:


That picture there represents about five evenings of body working and block sanding on that tank. Geez, I hope it's worth it all in the end! By late week I was able to get the tank into primer and ready for color:


So now, the tank had caught up with all the other panels - sides and duck tail and lucky me, a new seat kit and something special I ordered with it showed up on my front steps and you'll get to see some of this a bit later, however, I had stripped the old seat down early in the week to discover it had a lot of rust termites and new I was going to have to resolve the pan. While at work on Friday, I happened to notice this 1950's era double bulb, ceiling heat lamp assembly that was tossed in the trash. I picked up the fixture and realized it was made of some stout metal about the same thickness as my seat pan so I chunked it in the back of the truck for later consideration. I got home that evening and immediately set it on my bench:


Definitely not pretty but that's okay, it only needs to be strong and I cut it up with my angle grinder removing all the tabs and flattening it out into sheet stock, then slid my seat pan on edge along it and traced the good side of the pan onto it:


Good fit!
It took me about 30 minutes to cut out the shape I traced and transfer it to the rusted-out side of the seat pan:


You can see how rusted-out the pan is along the mid-lower section but the reality is the entire side was weakened and needed work which is why the patch panel I cut from the old ceiling lamp is so long. Well, I didn't have my MIG welder setup yet so that was it for the night.
Saturday morning I rushed into the garage to prepare for painting the panels and tank and a little something else that needed some quick, minor attention. The idea was to get the painting all done before noon when the heat would be too much. And so it went. Smoothly even! By noon I had all the panels painted and clear coated. Here's some pics of the first stage before clear was applied:


Ooooh! What's this? This ain't stock?
I've always liked the look of the speedy, smaller fairings and saw this one when I was buying my seat kit online and took the chance on it mainly because it looked different from most yet still small and worked with the stock 7" headlamp.
In the bottom right you can see the two side covers and through the headlamp hole is a tall box that contains my new seat kit


Here's the tank. Not bad. It came out pretty straight if I do say so myself. But what's up with that blue metallic? Yeah, about that. When I test fit the new fairing the evening before, I had a change of heart on the color. The metallic blue is beautiful and pretty close to the stock color KZombie was born with but adding the fairing worried me it might be too much. I checked my paint supply and I had 2 cans of the metallic blue and 3 cans of the black pearl metallic. Hmmm? Do I chance it?
Nah!
I shot everything in the black pearl metallic because I knew I would have enough vs the blue which I just might not. In the end, I used every ounce of the black paint so it was a good decision or I wouldn't have been able to complete all the painting. I guess, I'll save the metallic blue for the 1000 CSR project.

While the skins were all drying I went back to the seat pan and began tacking the new metal onto the eroded side. I kinda' felt like a caveman bashing rocks again in my garage because I didn't have any of my dollies or body hammers. Just a small ball peen and a big hammer used for pipe work but it served pretty good as a dollie and the old MIG welder worked great too. Here's the pan after an hour of welding and metal bashing:


I did discover that my seat pan's metal cleats or triangle points or whatever the heck they're called were pretty gnarly and not up for re-upholstery. Problem is I didn't have any tooling to punch metal cleanly to make new, sharp points so I basically had to stop at this point. Just flap disc'd and wire wheeled the surface rusty areas and shot it with some black paint for now. I've been given some good pointers by the gents here in another thread on how to make my own tack strips so that'll be on the workbench soon and with luck I can finally get my new seat kit installed.

Today. Father's Day. I slept in and not even my dodgie dog stirred to wake me with the sunrise. Nice!
Came downstairs late and made a coffee and sat outside on the back patio with the darling wife. She asked me if I wouldn't mind going shopping with her this morning? She said she needed to pickup some fabric to make the granddaughters some dresses but also had to stop by HFT for some saw blades for another project and maybe I might need something there? I agreed. I keep forgetting to get a grease gun and grease the swing arm and I wanted a few other odd ball bits. Then she has me unload the back of the car. Why? I say, fabric and a few bits I need will fit just fine in the back. Just leave it all the other junk in there. But noooo, I hadda clean out all the boxes and stuff and put it inside at her insistence. Whatever. Women. I'm in a good mood and not looking to rock any boats so I oblige and we're off. Turns out, her reasoning for emptying the back of the car was because she knew there was a sale on a rolling tool box at HFT. Nice, big, 5" wheels that don't stutter over every little bit of dirt. Lots of shelves, locking and has the top cover closed at almost the exact height I was going to build my rolling work bench at. Hmmmm? Sweet! Thanks hun!
So, I guess having kept my reluctance to empty the car to myself was a good thing. Scored a Father's Day gift which I've already assembled and put to good use in the garage!
The rest of the day, I worked on assembling more of KZombie. The new grease gun saw the swing arm greased up nicely. I bought some rubber caps for the grease fitting and the brake calipers. I picked up some dual element bulb holders to finally make my front turn signals both running lights and turn signals and rewired them into place and then slapped some of the new panels on too. The sides are just temporary, as is the gas tank which is waiting for the petcock rebuild parts. I have the new fuel line and vacuum hose too.
The new fairing worked out great although I must say it is a tough installation that required extra hands ala my darling better half to hold things while I fished wires from the front turn signals through it, the fork ears, the headlamp bucket etc..
Yeah, yeah.Shut up and show us the pics already.
The new fairing installed and functional (although I need to fab a small bracket for the bottom):


Side view, mocked-up with no seat but notice that cool, rolling tool chest in the background?


Of course it was only moments later when I went to roll the bike into the garage that I discovered my handlebars were slightly too low and instantly I dinged the throttle cable into the tank. Doh!
So the first ceremonious dent has already been achieved in my nearly flawless-straight tank. Sigh.

i also picked up some fine tipped artist's paint brushes today so I can apply a small bit of gold paint to the side cover emblems. I'm not sure if I'm going to do any pin striping or not now. I can't seem to come to terms with a color that goes with black pearl metallic which sorta has every color in it due to the pearlized elements. We'll see.

Wrench! She's getting so close! That metallic looks super sexy on the bike too, good choice!

Devin

Hey Devin!

Hope y'all are enjoying some nice weather! I have family in northern Alberta suffering through the heat and being out of the house due to that crazy fire (their house is melted looking, all the windows are cracked and it's one of only six houses in the whole neighborhood not reduced to a pile of ashes! Ack! ) So, I'm trying not to be pissy about sweating in the heat of my garage while working on the bike!

Yes. I'm pretty pleased with the color too and have recently thought to maybe try a twin red/white pinstripe and also red body/white raised edges on the emblems. Hopefully it'll work out. We'll see if my hand is steady enough for this task.

I gotta admit though, as the fairing has been on for a few days now that every time I look at it, I hear "Luuuuuke! I am your father!"

So it's hot in Canada too? Maybe it's not so bad here after all.
Steve

Hey Steve!
Well it can get hot up there too but not triple digit HAWWWT like it does for folks in the south of the USA.
I remember a few years ago when my wife's land rover started overheating... (picture a chick in a dress, climbing up into the engine bay of a tall SUV, on the side of a highway... oh geez). I swapped my vehicle with her to spare her further indignity... No good deed goes unpunished though and a few days later my rig's AC went kaput... We set the record that year for the most consecutive days in triple digits (basically the whole summer). Guess who got to sweat thru several changes of clothes fixing the cooling systems of our vehicles? Got really used to waking at 2am and doing EVERYTHING i could before 9am that summer because after 9am it appears my vampire blood began to melt.