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Yaegunp wrote:

Kawboy wrote: That must have been making a hell of a noise for quite some time and the PO didn't hear it or was he just stupid?? What a mess and I guess the only saving grace is that the 3 cap screws go in from the back so they couldn't completely come out and turn into shrapnel.

There are 2 guilty parties here John. The first and foremost is the seller (not the owner) of the motorcycle who is a reasonably well known Z1300 specialist who lives 1000kms from where I live. I remember a noise being there at the time I bought it and was told that it was normal for the bike and its age (the noise was only noticeable at idle). Who was I to question a guru?

The second guilty party is of course my naive self who has owned the bike for the last 8 years. Albeit, the bike has only done just over 300 km's in the last 3 years. The majority of the damage, I believe, was done very recently in my efforts to get the bike started after redoing the carbs and installing new ignition coils. There was a lot of cranking going on at that time with very little engine noise.

So the answer is the previous seller was cunning and the current owner was stupid . The current owner is becoming less stupid the more he learns about these glorious bastards.

Just trying to throw some blame out to the previous owner for not catching this It breaks my heart to see mechanical damage like this.

Our Z1300 specialists here are probably KZQ, Trikebldr, Tonto, Lucien-Harpress to name a few. For the record, I'm not a KZ1300 specialist, however my mechanical abilities have been fortified with a lot of exposure to nuclear mechanical engineering so I tend to look at mechanical issues more from an engineers point of view rather than a simple it's broke, fix it point of view.

It's unfortunate that the Z1300 specialist/guru sold it to you with the understanding that the noise was "normal". The definition of noise is unwanted sound. Sometimes mechanical machinery have noises but it's an inherited design issue and is an acceptable sound for that machine. Sometimes sounds are enhanced to promote the sound but it's noise to others ie straight pipes on a Harley is "Music" to Harley lovers and unwanted "noise" to those who drive Ferrari's. Either way, I tend to question all sounds until I understand the nature of the sound and accept it or reject it and fix it. I'm glad you chose to dive into this sound and determined that it was a mechanical failure. Kudos to you for doing that. Shame on the previous owner for accepting it.

You noted that you're "naïve" due to lack of knowledge on these bikes. Sure, We're all guilty of that and the more we share on this site the better our understanding of "all things KZ1300" Thanks for sharing this experience. Those that have read this thread will have gained knowledge here and why else are we here if not to share and impart knowledge.

I cleaned up the rest of the assembly with some fine emery cloth as best I could so as not to change the mechanical purpose of it all, then installed the starter clutch repair kit and voila it all worked and now sounds like it’s supposed to (music to the ears really).

In one way the experience has been good as hopefully I have been able to contribute to the forum in some small way. Thanks to all who had a crack at sorting this one out.