Spare time KR1 project finally finished...

[RickNC30]

We`re on the home straight now - on to bodywork etc...

Here`s the first assembly of the complete bike -



Taking it piece by piece -

Front mudguard is an OEM ZX-10R unit that I bought from a dealer who was clearing out some NOS parts and uncollected orders - It needed some extra brackets as per my last post to fit the ZX-6R forks, I asked the sprayer to colour match that original Kawasaki green for the rest of the bike.

The tank was another ebay purchase, it was straight, rust-free but badly sprayed in a horrible colour - unfortunately by the time it arrived via courier it had gained three large dents but hey, every cloud has a silver lining, we claimed for the damage and the compensation paid not only to have the dents removed but also get the whole tank filled, flatted, prepped and into primer ready for spraying later.

The seats are stock pads, recovered in black `suede effect` vinyl by the admirable Clive Harrison, master upholsterer and bike enthusiast, who has been refurbishing seats for local bikers for as long as I can remember and whose work is never less than immaculate.



The race body kit came from BB Plastics, chosen because they appear to be the only supplier whose seat mould has a proper curve to the upper surface of the seat hump -



- all the others I have seen go for a simpler `table top` which just doesn`t look right.

No part of the seat hump/side panel assembly is load bearing so I`ve kept the mounting simple and minimal - the rear light aperture has about 3mm clearance all round and sits on a strip of 3mm thick x 10mm wide dense self adhesive foam around the base of the light lens for a vibration free location, Stainless M6 countersunk Allen screws with specially made small alloy panel washers hold the lower mounting points and the front corners are tagged to the frame with pads of 3M Dual Lock, a kind of industrial strength Velcro.

The fairing is a simple two piece mould from the same supplier - the belly pan needed quite a bit of cutting away to clear the fat JL pipes but the finished result looks quite cool and aerodynamic. I have lined the whole belly pan up to crankcase level with 3 layers of gold heat proof tape as a precaution against scorching the paintwork.

Mounts for the upper fairing are the stock screen/mirror brace and frame side brackets, the belly pan simply fits to the upper fairing with 6 Dzus Panex fasteners and is so light it needs no other support.

I puzzled for quite a while over what to do for the headlamp before coming up with the solution when I found a company who can still supply polycarbonate headlamp protectors for the KR1/S - I ordered one minus fittings or adhesive pads, taped it to the blind front of the fairing, drilled through the corners, marked up, cut out and secured it with 5mm windscreen bolts - the result is light, neat and gives the fairing nose its original, slightly curved contour which looks better than just a flat transparency.



You`ll see from the pencil marks that I was considering a white number board on the fairing nose, but I finally decided against it...

The `teardrop` indicators were a possible fallback position if I couldn`t find stock shaped ones but I did eventually track down a supplier in eastern Europe who had pattern versions of the OEM units.

Various mountings - I`ve mentioned these elsewhere on the forum but I`ll repeat it here -

My friends Richard and Dave at R&D Precision in St. Ives (Cambs, not Cornwall) are both bikers and always up for a challenge so I asked them to make a batch of the NLA KR-1 type fairing mounts - they came up with these (and they are beautiful...)



They also made me a new front seat boss and the top hat spacers for the front and rear tank mountings in shiny stainless - the rear seat mounting rail I constructed myself from a length of 10mm alloy bar and a couple of M6 ring bolts



As far as possible the whole bike has been put together with matching stainless steel flange-headed bolts to give an overall integrated kind of look to it.

[RickNC30]

I promised to return to the subject of those Chinese dashes - I know this is of limited interest as most people will be doing fairly standard restorations but here it is anyway.

The clocks that I`m talking about are Chinese replicas of the Koso RX-2N dash. This is the real thing with a ticket price of around £250 -



The two ripoff versions are pretty close copies, same size, same look, same mounting but available for under £30 from ebay, Ali or Amazon -



- the two types look the same from the front but turn them over and the one on the left has a black multi plug, the one on the right a grey plug and `SS182` moulded into the casing. The other thing which will distinguish them if you are looking at a sales listing is the one on the left has 7 colour options for the backlight, the right hand one only 2.



This matters to KR owners because the one on the right (SS182) will work on a KR1/S, the other (black plug) won`t. The function menus are slightly different on the two models, the critical thing being that on the SS182 model you can switch the rev counter input from +ve to -ve, on the other it is fixed positive wave input and because the rev counter pulse from the KR1 CDI unit is negative, the tach simply doesn`t work.

If anyone is thinking of using this type of dash on a KR1 you are welcome to contact me and I will show you how to adapt the intermediate loom which comes with the dash to `plug and play` into the KR-1 main harness.

[RickNC30]

And finally...

The paintwork - this was done for me by Terry at APVM Body Repair in Rackheath, near Norwich.

It`s always difficult to know who to trust with your panels but Terry had sprayed a couple of classic race bikes for a friend of mine and the fact that he had been trusted with an RG500 and a TZ750 body kit made me inclined to think that his skills were up to the job - when he sent me these `work in progress` pics a couple of weeks in, I knew that I had chosen the right man...







Getting a full set of panels painted is not a cheap job these days - the paintwork for this bike cost me £800, but set against what some of the big name companies charge and considering that I gave Terry `straight from the mould ` panels complete with lumps and bumps, the usual odd little voids and pinholes and the imprints of OEM stickers that the mould maker couldn`t be bothered to remove from his donor fairing, which he then filled, smoothed, primed and flatted to perfection before even starting to apply paint, I think his price was on the generous side of fair. The pinstripes are not tape BTW, they are properly masked and painted and that`s also a very labour intensive task.

That`s pretty much it for the build but if you need any more answers or explanations, please post your questions on here...

When we eventually shift the floods and fallen trees and I can get back to the dyno for some full power runs I will post the results on this thread.

Jim`s road test should be in Practical Sportsbikes in the first half of next year - frustratingly, I have a file full of the static and action shots from our test day here on my PC, but they are PS copyright and embargoed until after the magazine comes out.

Rick

[SP_BOTT]

Nice write-up on the resto, you must be very pleased with the outcome. Just finished my one in white primer/base, and not sure where to go with it yet, nice to see something a little different too.

Great info on the el cheapo speedo, interesting fact on the rev counter inputs, never knew that.

well done

[RickNC30]

Back to blog mode -

We had a slightly unsatisfactory dyno session on Wednesday, caught out by a jet sizing issue - I had upped the mains from the #135s of the original build to #140s but when we tried a full throttle run on the dyno it actually showed up a couple of AFR points leaner than on the first session.

Very odd, but we had to put it down to jet sizing differences between manufacturers - as I understand it, the EBC-supplied `AB` brand jets that I use are sized in the same way as Dynojets, which is to say by the actual diameter of the orifice (a #120 jet is 1.20mm, #155 is 1.55mm etc.), whereas Keihin and Mikuni size markings are a function of some formula (a different one for each of those brands) involving the flow rate. Anyway, I`ll get some AB #150s in there over the weekend and we`ll have another shot at it next week.

Looking at what we were able to learn on the day, it seems like the BHP will end up somewhere in the upper fifties once the jetting is sorted - I`ll be happy with that, it`s comfortably in the fun zone.

Something I did notice is that my power curves show no sign of the `transition dip` at the KIPS valve rotation point that most of the charts posted on here seem to have. That may simply be a function of some `happy coincidence` harmonics between the non-standard carbs and pipes and the slightly longer inlet trumpets, but I did actually have a fiddle with the KIPS valve timing (which is fully adjustable on the Ignitech CDI) after my first couple of rides to try and trim out that slight hesitation - my thought was that the change point was maybe a bit high, that the low rev configuration was past its peak power point and dropping off significantly before the high rev configuration took over. The mid point of valve rotation on a KR1S is 8500rpm, on the KR1 it`s 8000rpm so I reset mine to a mid point of 7700 (valve rotation starts at 7400, complete by 8000) and it seems to have helped.

Obviously there are a lot of variables due to non-stock parts here so it`s difficult to be sure, but any comments? Has anyone else tried this...?

(Don`t shout at me, I know I could search the forum but I don`t have time right now...)

[Coose]

Yes, DougB has found similar and I'm going to try his Zeeltronic map in mine shortly; valve starts to open at 7k, stops at 8.2k. Doug has found this to work quite well, but I'm sure he'll be along shortly to chip in.

Both his and my motors are fettled in a slightly different manner - both on 28mm PWKs, tuned motors but Doug is on stock S pipes and I'm on Lomas so it'll be interesting to see the outcome and compare them to yours.

[RickNC30]

First priority of the next dyno session will be to get the fuelling right (in the interests of mechanical safety before we do multiple power runs), next thing will be to run the 21deg, 23 deg and 25 deg full advance ignition curves back to back and find the right compromise between maximum attainable power and reliability - after that, if John has the time and I have the funds, it would be interesting to explore the KIPS performance.

I had already had the thought, which I subsequently found expressed in one of Phil`s posts, that it would be interesting to set up runs with KIPS fully open and fully closed, then overlay the curves to establish exactly what opening point would be needed to bring the high speed configuration in before the low speed one runs of steam.

A run with the valve half open would also be educational - it occurred to me that if the dip is not caused by the KIPS opening at too high an rpm figure then the other possibility is that a half-open valve might be cause some unwanted interference or resonance that could give a momentary power loss created by the valve itself as it rotates.

As I understand KIPS, it`s definitely not intended as a `progressive` type power valve arrangement, it just switches quickly between the two positions at a preset rpm point, so although I did think about going DougB`s way and broadening the transition point, I decided against it - not saying that`s necessarily correct, it`s just the way I figured it out - but if you could empirically test quick vs slow rotation then presumably it would give some kind of answer to the above questions - if a transition over a broader rev range makes the dip worse/wider then it`s likely to be an artifact of the valve rotation process, whereas if a quick transition but moved further down the rev range improves/removes it then we can assume that Kawasaki just failed to set the transition point in the right place to adequately `bridge the gap` between the fully open and fully closed power curves.

These are only Wet Sunday Afternoon musings - very happy to hear any discussion or disagreement...

Rick

[JanBros]

it would be interesting to set up runs with KIPS fully open and fully closed, then overlay the curves to establish exactly what opening point would be needed to bring the high speed configuration in before the low speed one runs of steam.

A run with the valve half open would also be educational

that is te only correct way to find the best point.
they are not "change timing valve's" - allthough they also do that because Kawa chose to give the auxiliary's a higher timing but has been proven since it is not the way to go.

They do 2 things :
adjust blowdown time.area to the rev's. simply said make the exhaust bigger so the gases can get out in time before the transfers open.
open the KIPS-chambers so part of the gases travel longer through the pipe making the pipe work better at lower rpm's

they should be openend as quickly as possible, not over a range of rpm's. just find the intersecting point of powergraph's with KIPS open en KIPS closed, and than open the KIPS a couple 100 rpm's above that point and close them again the samr below that point, to avoid the KIPS not knowing what to do when riding at that particular rpm.

opening them gradualy will only disturb the exhaust gas flow in the duct.

[RickNC30]

Thanks, Jan -

I`ve done enough background reading in my relatively short time as a KR owner to have a fairly good idea of what the KIPS valves do and don`t do but thank you for the more detailed explanation.

Reference the timing of the valve rotation, that`s exactly the way I was thinking about it - it`s a system where, in an ideal world, you would open the KIPS valves almost instantly but in the real world you need to spread the rotation slightly so that you don`t end up with a `flutter point` where the valves would oscillate if you were trying to hold a steady throttle at that particular rpm.

[RickNC30]

Final round up for now -

As yet I haven`t been back for that final dyno session - I live out in farming country and by the time John at Track Electronics had a slot to spare we were knee deep in mud and crap from potato and sugar beet harvesting so the KR has been drained, polished and parked for the winter.

The road test that Practical Sportsbikes did in October is published in the January 2021 issue which is in the newsagents this week if you want to take a look...

Rick