Yeah, I'm a mechanic by trade so I know what I'm looking at, and they didn't look old at all. The bike had done 38,000kms when I bought it, but like you said you can't tell. Will be a job over winter I think.
Anyway, some build progress...
The guy I bought this from had been playing around with this for a while and came to the conclusion the carbs were the cause of the issue. He replaced the original carb with a pair of mikuni VM32's but still couldn't get it running right.
I probably spent my weekends over the next couple of month's trying to tune these and waiting for different jets to arrive. In the end, I went back to basics and checked the compression only to find I was down on one cylinder.
After pulling the head and barrel off I found the rings had broken and had stacked up on each other and damaging the recess in the piston at the same time.
Turns out that parts aren't too common for these. After about a month of hunting for them, I stumbled across a company in Germany that sold them. And I only found them by putting the original part number into ebay as it was all in German.