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And the finished product...

And of course we need to lighten this enormous piece of machinery...

a bit of cleaning and it's starting to look better

Then work began on the rear wheel...

At this stage I started getting excited as the KZ had been apart for so long I was starting to think I only had a box of parts. Now it was starting to resemble a bike again.

New tapered roller head bearings from Pyramid in the UK - good firm, very quick, good product - arrived in a week.

Drilled the rotor...(learned that a countersink bit works better then a larger diameter bit for chamfering). Saved 120g by drilling. Every little bit helps.

I fabricated a tray for electrical components as I want to ditch the side covers and just have an open frame.

More pics pic of the seat build ... (And a pic of body work on the tank - the PO laid it down in one of the canyons above Boulder.

OK - been a while since I updated - apologies. Happily (for me anyway) I've been busy with the machine. The big thing was the seat -why did I decide I need to make my own seat! (only found out after I finished I could have bought a identical seat to the one I knocked up from Airtech for...

Yeah - I noticed after I mounted my GSXR reasets, that even on the bike above ^^^ that the angle is wrong (the mounting holes need to be straight up and down) - not sure how he resolved it, I'm going to use a little triangle of 1/4" aluminum flat-bar to correct the angle. This has caused an...

oh yeah - I'm ditching the stock instrument cluster for a bit of aluminum and a old Yamaha tach I picked up from the scrape yard.

Yeah ~$250 is what 3 other places quoted - then tried Roadrunner (which is a big place that I've driven past 1000 times) and was pretty psyched to hear $150 all in for frame an swingarm.

Yeah - the cowl wasn't bad but the seat was a real non-starter. Have rearsets (see photo). They're from a gsxr750 - $40 from craigslist. I welded a couple of plated to the frame and thought I was good to go. When I got the rearsets home, I was really excited about getting them on, because...

Next came grinding off everything that didn't actually contribute to going, stopping and turning. This is actually fairly nerve-racking if you spy how thin the walls of the tubing are. There are a few areas that aren't really glass smooth, but I wasn't risking another turn of the grinder...

and the next thing you know you don't really have a bike anymore but a few crates and a frame and a motor (they're lovely to look at those twins aren't they...

Well the imagination wandered and I started planning and wondering, what about loosing the seat...

And here's the front end after a little cleaning and painting, grinding and polishing and some clip-ons. (they were later re-adjusted).

And then the front end... Sorry for the blurry pic.

One of the first things I did was go after the tail section - cut, mod, cut.