Resurrecting my '79 KZ1300 from a 28-year nap

My throwover bags came in today, and as expected, the turn signals interfered badly.



Tried to come up with the simplest/cheapest solution. Wound up with a couple 3/4" marker lights from the parts store and a piece of painted scrap aluminum.

A neat solution!

Those black painted engine covers look good on the GL.
I’m envious of your garage space. I still can’t find anywhere to work on my bike.

biltonjim wrote: A neat solution!

Those black painted engine covers look good on the GL.
I’m envious of your garage space. I still can’t find anywhere to work on my bike.

Thanks. It's not a huge space, but it's adequate. When we were looking for a house, that's the only thing I would not compromise on. I needed a shop. Nothing too fancy, but I had to have something.

This is the basement of our house. Having a basement shop has pluses and minuses, but we got a great deal on the house, so I can't be too picky.

Alright alright alright, back again.

My tach drive seals showed up today. What I thought was a rubber cylinder inside the tach drive was really just the inside of the seal that had broken off of the metal ring. After extracting the old seal in three pieces, I popped the new one in. I put it in the same way the old one was, with the sealing lip and spring facing down into the tach drive. I couldn't tell the orientation of the seal from the parts fiche, so that's the best I could do. Hope it's right.

The old seal was really no longer a seal. The opening was half again as big as the drive gear shaft, so there was really no contact to speak of between the drive gear and the seal.

Rode it about 20 miles, and that whole area of the motor is still bone dry. I think I'm gonna take it to Charlotte this weekend, so that'll be another nice long ride to see if the issue is fixed.

One other thing I had noticed was that the bike would crank over even if it was in gear. I found a jumper that the PO had put in across the clutch switch pins. Removed that since I almost dumped it doing that already.

Thanks for sharing. It's not the first time and probably not the last that a new owner got set up by a previous owner (knucklehead) Almost makes us want to create a "checklist" before initial testing of a rebirth.

Another weekend in the books. With the tach seal fixed up, I decided to ride the bike to Charlotte for the weekend to a family reunion. Nice opportunity to meet up with Dad and ride around a bit with him too.

Left out Friday evening and stopped for dinner in Waynesville. I noticed a small trail of oil down the right side of the block, but then I managed to convince myself that it was just residual leaked oil draining away.

From there, I went to a friends house in Columbus, NC to drop off some BMW parts from my wrecked K100 (my wife was in the car behind me with the parts.) A fill-up after that showed my best fuel mileage thus far of 36mpg. The fact that that tank was burned going almost exclusively downhill didn't hurt, but hey, 36mpg!

From that fill-up, we rode straight on into Charlotte. After about 80 miles, I noticed the bike was starting to miss a bit and feel like it does when you hit reserve and the carbs start dropping off one at a time. I pulled over at the next exit to investigate, and found my fuel filter was almost empty! My theory is that the heat off the motor caused some air in the filter to expand and try to make it back up the line to the tank, but the pressure of the fuel coming down just sorta stuck it in limbo. Vapor lock, basically.

After a few minutes of twisting and turning the filter, I managed to get the air out, and rode the last 3-4 miles without incident. I need to re-engineer my filter and shutoff valve geometry I guess.

Saturday after the reunion, dad and I rode downtown (or, ugh, "Uptown" as the powers that be insist on calling it) and snapped a couple photos of the bikes.





His is a 2005 Vulcan 2000, pretty much the last word if you want the largest displacement v-twin engine available.

On Sunday, we left out at around 12:30 and headed back west. Dad rode with me as far as South Mountain State Park and then turned around and made tracks back home. I got home right as the sun was setting and the temperature was dropping significantly. Last fill-up showed 32mpg, this time, mostly uphill and considerably more fun backroads. Still not awful I guess, but kinda funny that most compact cars will easily get better fuel mileage.



After the initial stop in Waynesville, there were no more oil leaks. I guess some oil had just been sitting on the seam between the head and the block, and when it got warm, it started streaming down. Oil consumption has also dropped significantly, maybe I had a stuck ring or something that cleaned itself up recently. We did about 450 miles over the weekend, and when I got home, the oil level was exactly where I left it in the sight glass.