My father and I purchased a 1977 Kawasaki KZ650 in need of some TLC from some family members in southern Manitoba after I had expressed an interest in motorcycles. My father was a seasoned biker and I learned a lot from him throughout the process. The motorcycle technically ran when we purchased it, but not very well. After a year of learning and a considerable amount of elbow grease, I had a wonderful motorcycle and a great experience under my belt. I replaced parts of the transmission, converted many mechanical components to solid state components, and painted it.
I unfortunately didn’t detail this restoration as well as I would have liked to - it was one of my first big projects.
Despite my best efforts I could not find a higher resolution photo of the motorcycle on the day I bought it. This is the motorcycle loaded into the back of my beat-up Ford Ranger.
The bike ran pretty rough when I got it. One of the first places I started was with the carburetors. I had ordered a new jet and gasket kit online to get them in the best condition I could. I followed the directions to do an initial tuning on them but eventually sought the help of a local mechanic so he could hook them up to a balance bar and sync them.
The electrical system was also pretty rough. I found a kit online to convert to a point-less ignition system which was great because I was really bad at shaving down points and I wasn’t looking forward to doing it regularly. It worked very well and never gave me problems again.
The rectifier/regulator on the bike was an an old mechanical device that would not reliably charge the battery. I ordered a solid state replacement on eBay from Japan. The part arrived in a ziploc-style sandwich bag with instructions printed off on a home printer. The instructions looked like they had gone through Google Translate and I had to read them about twenty times before I could infer what exactly I was supposed to do. The part did work as advertised once installed correctly, though.
This bike has both a kick starter and an electric starter. The kick starter worked just fine but the electric starter often wouldn’t catch and would instead just grind - it needed a new starter clutch. I went to a local shop, Canadian Motorcycle, that specialized in parts for old motorcycles and to my luck there was another KZ650 sitting in the back. The owner of the shop let me take my tools into the back and pull out the starter clutch. He also gave me a good deal on it since I nicely set aside all of the other parts I took off to get to it.
With all of these things replaced the bike ran pretty great. I did some other basic things too like replace the tires and brakes, and had a local reupholstery shop redo the duct tape seat.
A family friend helped me paint it. Doing this taught me that painting was was all about prep - the actual act of painting was a very small part of the whole process. In hindsight I should have waited for it to warm up a bit (my frowny face is in response to a pretty cold day) but I was just too excited to get the bike finished and on the road.
I was very happy with the way the painted pieces came out. It’s very satisfying to get a glimpse of what the final result will be.
This was the result of my efforts. There was definitely more I could have done but I am very happy with it given the budget and resources I had available to me.
Thanks for reading!