Steve Collison

Last year I acquired a 1982 (I need to confirm the year) Kawasaki KZ550 from my father-in-law. I still owe money on it, but we’ll come to that later.

I’ve spent a few months fiddling with the bike, and have finally concluded that there’s a whole host of things that need fixing. Here’s the problems I’m aware of so far, in no particular order:

1. The carbs are overflowing – I believe this is being caused by the floats that probably need to be adjusted.
2. There’s a hole in the side of the air box.
3. It didn’t come with an air filter.
4. The battery won’t hold charge.
5. The rev counter wasn’t working – the cable turned but wasn’t connected, the connection was rusted but after some dedication I eventually managed to get it on.
6. The speedometer doesn’t working.
7. The front and back tires need to be replaced as they aren’t roadworthy.
8. I should probably change the oil.
9. I’m not sure there’s any brake fluid in the reservoir.
10. It has trouble revving over 5K rpm.
11. Due to the trouble it has revving, I am lead to believe that the carb may be full or varnish. Perhaps a rebuild is in order.
12. Lots of split ends on hoses.
13. The breather hose doesn’t have a connecting pipe at the end that reconnects to the air box.

Luckily, my father in law gave me the KZ550 manual in PDF format! So I at least have some direction with these problems.

That’s all so far, if I can fix these problems everything else is aesthetic. Speaking of aesthetics, I need to upload some pictures.

This is the only picture of the KZ550 that I have so far. Stay tuned for more!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 5:58 pm and is filed under KZ550. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.