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It never occured to me that 6th gear (overdrive) wouldn't give me my top speed. If I find the occasion to test out the limits of 5th gear I'll give it another try.

Low end throttle is a little grumpy still but it pulls smoothly through all RPM ranges until 7500. Maybe I'll make a winter project out of synching the carbs to see if there's an improvement, or maybe I'll send them to WiredGeorge. Might be worth an e-mail at least.

calculating top speed is not hard if you know your 6th gear ratio and your final drive ratio and your rear wheel diameter. assuming you have enough power to pull redline in top gear. i did a quick search for the ratio's but my internet dropped before i found them. anyway you should be able to get more than 85mph, something is wrong. also make sure you are wringing it out in 4th and 5th before you go to 6th

Well, for the 550 cc engine, reaching 176 km/h (110 mph) is normal, as my logical thinking, my KZ200 (bore up to 225) can run for more than 130 km/h (82 mph) and still can be faster, its just because the traffic condition in indonesia. Well, i know because of the age, maybe the speedometer wrong, but one day i ran up with the NSR 150 SP, and for sure it speedometer is correct. Oh, by the way, my bro in jakarta can run the KZ250 for over 145 km/h (91 mph).
The handling, yeeeaah, its relative to the driver i think, but my 'light' bike, 110-120 km/h (69-75 mph)is a reasonable speed for having a good handling.
Just be proud of having that speed on our 'old' bikes, thats one of the reason why we love KZ's !! rite ??

my 81 KZ550A has got a slow reading speedo, like 15 mph
slow at 60
a digital bicycle speedo fixed that, and it says 85 a lot
ya say it pulls to 7500 ?
the fun starts at 6500

I had an 81 KZ550A1, RC pipe, K&N pods, would run 115 with my 210 lb butt on it. At least thats what the cop said I was doing that day.