Retroactive KZ750E Project Thread

More clear, sealing over the stripes.

The paint laid down plenty smooth for me, just some localized polishing needed. I don't like to color sand the final clear other than to remove dust pimples.

Seat cover #2 installed. Turned out okay this time. A little loose in places but I was afraid to pull too much. Gotta find some strap hardware now...

Moving on to the engine... Blasting time again.

Valve cover is from a KZ750 Turbo. No air injection junk on top. And the oil pan is from a later model 750 that has the oil cooler outlet ports on the front.

Two coats of VHT engine paint primer followed by three satin black coats. If I had to do it again I would have used Gunkote. VHT paint sucks; it's brittle and chips like crazy, and it doesn't resist fuel easily either.

A little sandpaper to bring out the highlights...

Soda blasted the head. Trying to avoid grit in the blind oil galleys. The soda worked great, but it's not just a simple rinse with water and you are done aftermath. I scrubbed this head to within an inch of it's life before being confident of no more grit remaining behind.

Trying my hand at a little pocket porting. Just trying to smooth the sharp edges in the bowl. The short side radius was particularly poorly done and sharp.

The last two photos show the after.

Some seat clean up work performed with Neway cutters.

I was surprised by how poorly the seats were cut from Kawasaki. The seat width was very inconsistent but I was able to clean that up.

Service manual calls for 1.0mm max valve seat width, but one side of the intake valves were at 1.5mm and the other 1.0. Kawasaki apparently was really sloppy with their machine work. Was trying to figure out what Neeway cutters to order when I decided to see that a 75* Suzuki cutter would do. Low and behold, it was the perfect size to narrow down the seat width. Learned that the valve seat angles for this head are not consistent because the 75* cutter only contacted the seat on the area as needed. Call it a gift from God on Christmas day. Happy now!

A local shop called Costa Mesa R&D cleaned up the valve faces for me. The owner is awesome and has lots of nifty videos on You Tube. He did the valves on the spot and only charged me $20. He had to cut them more than I thought they would need because they were not properly concentric. They are good to go now though...

Ditched the clean air injection system...

Rebuilding the clutch hub...

Some guy on the KZ650 site sells these nifty neoprene clutch hub bumper thingies that really tighten up the clutch action. With the stock bumpers the clutch had quite a bit of play, but none with the new bumpers.