My neighbour's Kawasaki Z1000, a postscript

My neighbour returned from his holiday in Spain on his Z1000 Kawasaki which was frantically still being repaired the night before his departure due to a badly leaking oil seal (see earlier post on the subject). He travelled 3000 miles without incident and had a great time, although the chain is now apparently well due for replacement. It turns out that on the morning of the departure the bloke who repaired the engine rang to ask if all was now OK and asked if anyone had remembered to remove the piece of tape protecting the breather on the engine. "What tape?"....

A quick check of the breather outlet from the crankcase showed the offending piece of tape which was quickly removed. The effectively blocked breather was allowing the crankcase pressure to build up which is what pushed the original oil seal out of its housing (although it was a remarkably loose fit anyway). All was then well and the bike should hopefully run for years now.

Trip to Wales

A few weekends ago I had a ride out to North Wales on the Trophy Sport MZ to give it a good run with the new carburettor bits in, do some Round Britain Rally Clues and drop in at an MZ rally. The first stop after a 120 mile thrash to clear the exhaust out was Llyn Brenin where I took this photo of the boats etc. Two RBR clues later I got to the MZ rally and spent a very pleasant couple of hours chatting to folk and not winning anything in the raffle!
This shiny sidecar outfit is pulled along by a late model Turkish made MZ. The owner was lucky enough to win the first prize in the raffle, the bike below:

This sectioned engine was on display, it all moves, watch your fingers!
Pete and 'Chelle, good friends of mine from Oldham were there on their Jawa outfit. It cost £40 eight years ago and after being lovingly painted army green with what looks like a yard brush, it has provided good transport ever since. Bargain!
They also agreed to buy this tidy MZ 150 Trophy at the rally.
MZ Trophy Sports are rare bikes so I had to take a photo of the other one there.
This fake army bike Jawa is a great bike and belongs to the editor of the Jawa club magazine.
This bike had been tuned a bit, had an expansion chamber fitted and had the cylinder and head fins machined round from square to save weight. It apparently goes very well. Hats off to the owner for making so much effort.
This is a Chang Jiang outfit, a Chinese copy of a Russian copy of a pre-war BMW! Very nice, but according to the owner a bit of a challenge to keep running right.
Moto Guzzi Spada 1000 with Canterbury Carmobile giant sidecar. The seat is wide enough for 2!
The cleanest bike there, Mally Morgan's MZ Rotax engined Country 500. All Mally's bikes are in spanking condition.
Leaving the rally I travelled through Llangollen and then over the Horseshoe Pass. This is the view from near the top at dusk.
later on, in failing light I did two more RBR clues then stopped off at this Chinese takeaway north of Wrexham to have egg fried rice, noodles and curry sauce. The owner liked my bike, was amazed I was riding back to Yorkshire on it after 11 at night and remembered seeing lots of MZs back in the 1970s. I did 257 miles that day and thoroughly enjoyed the trip. The bike ran well but the carburation is still a bit off. I will persevere with it some time later but I can trust it to go a long way now I reckon.

It's not just old bikes which play up!

Apologies for the lack of posts of late. I had a short holiday (without motorcycles unfortunately) and then a great deal of other things to contend with.

My neighbour is also a bike fan, although his bikes are modern Kawasakis. He has been building up a four cylinder water cooled Z750 that he bought as a crashed write off with a view to touring Spain on it. All went well until he was getting it MOT tested and the engine dropped a valve wrecking the top end and bending a con rod.

Undeterred he then went and bought a Z1000, a right beast of a bike but then discovered top gear was whining. I would have left it until after the Spanish trip, but the engine was removed and sent off for repair. I got back off holiday mid evening on a Wednesday a couple of weeks back and discovered my neighbour very stressed indeed. The engine had been returned and refitted that day, but an exploratory run over the moors had produced a terrible oil leak. The trip to Spain started the following morning...

To cut a stressful tale down to a minimum, it turned out the engine rebuilder had not used a new oil seal for behind the final drive sprocket and it was a slack fit, oil pressure pushing it out of its housing. We ended up splitting the crankcases on the blown up 750 engine, carefully removing the oil seal off that and fitting it to the 1000 CC engine with some bearing fit to ensure it did not come out. By the time we had done and a test run had been successfully completed it was midnight. He set off the next day as planned and is due home tomorrow. I reckon it has been OK as he did not return home early!

All good character building stuff I guess.

Trip out to an MZ rally

I went to an MZ rally at Masham in North Yorkshire on the Trophy Sport last weekend. I picked a good route taking in twisty and quieter roads once I had got through Keighley. Near Bolton Abbey I caught up with this fine thing, a home made Vincent Comet special. The rider pulled in to tighten a loose lever so I pulled in behind him and we chatted for a while. The bike is a Vincent engine, gearbox and frame member (which includes the oil tank), most of the rest is home made, the rear frame being loosely based on a Norton featherbed. The swinging arm, leading link forks and the operating levers on the front brake are all home made.
The rider likes MZs too and was very interested in my bike. It turns out he had just sold a 250 Trophy. He was on a ride back to Whitby after visiting a friend in Ilkley, so the bike certainly gets some use.
Not much further on I turned on to the really little lanes and completely by chance met up with my friend Ian out for a spin on his mountain bike. Here he is planning his next off road excursion as his bike is apparently very good on rough tracks.
A bit further on I stopped to take in the view. Countryside for miles around, just great. This was taken at Greenhow Hill, above Pateley Bridge.
And here is the view from the other side of Pateley Bridge with Gouthwaite reservoir in the distance. I never got round to taking any photos at the rally and the next morning it was pouring with rain, so no more photos from this weekend unfortunately.

MZ Trophy Sport now running much better

I raised the needle in the carburettor by one notch on Monday evening and went for a test run. That's cured it. The bike now pulls really well with no pinking and just a slight lack of willingness to rev as highly as perhaps it should. I think this may be due to a clogged up exhaust which I will attempt to clear by going for a long run on main roads to see if it unclogs itself.

I went up to Buckstones at dusk, a viewpoint only a few miles away and one of the highest points around, right on the top of the Pennines. I love it there and it is ideal for a quick spin out. The A62 can be seen in the distance. It gets quite high as it crosses the Pennines, but it can be seen that the Buckstones road is much higher still. A lorry driver there told me that years ago he and a few mates had a bike just like mine as a field bike. He seemed very pleased to see the bike.

A degree of success with the Trophy Sport

Last night, aided by my mate Jonny the 250 Trophy Sport was treated to a replacement chain and new needle, needle jet and main jet in the carburettor. The former has got rid of the tight spot and the latter has definitely made a great difference. Before the bike was always running rich and vibrated a lot. Fuel consumption was poor at well under 50 MPG. The needle was visibly worn and the main jet seemed to be the wrong size.

I had a good run out tonight up on to the tops of the Pennines and back and the bike runs a lot smoother, but now there is a degree of pinking at mid throttle openings. This I was expecting as this type of MZ engine has the spark plug in at an angle from the right hand side and pinking can be a problem. It is possible to ride round it, but it is an irritation. I may try and raise the needle a notch to see if that cures it, but I am now confident in using the bike and will see how it goes.

On the bench 3

This is my MZ TS 150 trail bike. It started off many years ago the same as the shed, previously pictured on here, a standard road going bike. When I got it the machine had been half converted into a trail bike. The previous owner had no further need for it and I am a sucker for a poorly motorcycle so I bought it. It's return to proper working order has been a labour of love for sure and is ongoing. It is no exaggeration to say that almost everything on the bike was either broken, worn out, bodged or a combination of all three. It got to my house under its own power, but frankly I was surprised it managed that short journey and if it was a horse, it would surely have been glue many years ago. Since that time various parts of the bike have been painted, a 21" front wheel and high level mudguard fitted and dozens of small repairs carried out before putting the bike through its MOT test and getting it back on the road.

I was skint at this time and so needed to fix or replace the totally worn out engine upon the cheap. I managed to buy a complete engine bottom end for a tenner with the side covers missing and worn out primary drive. The piston and barrel from the original engine were usable and I had enough bits to make up another primary drive and fit the engine covers in my spares collection. I had to buy a few circlips and gaskets and the total cost for an engine that ran pretty well was £13. Result. However it was all a bit too good to last and the the engine which had obviously been stood for years before I got to it started to pump gearbox oil out the breather hole in the crankcase after a few hundred miles. As this is an early 150 engine with the main bearings lubricated by the gearbox oil the main bearing seals are inboard of the main bearings and therefore it is necessary to totally strip the engine to change them. These seals have gone hard and are now leaking allowing the pressure in the crankcase to transfer to the gearbox and pump the oil out.

No longer skint, I paid to have another engine to be rebuilt and I got the bike up on the bench and resting on axle stands supporting the footrests (there is no centre stand on this bike) to swap the engine over. At the same time my electrical guru friend Nigel is to fit one of the electronic ignition kits to the bike to get rid of the 6 volt electrics and reduce the bike's maintenance requirements. I also have removed the swinging arm and painted it as it was getting a bit rusty.

I was surprised and rather fed up when the replacement engine was dropped into the frame to discover that the rear engine mountings were rather a slack fit (see photo below)
It turns out that the later 150 TS series engines have a narrower crankcase casting at the rear, hence the large gap which needed to be filled. I had no idea that this was the case and that there was a difference between the engines but if nothing else it shows that after over 20 years of MZ ownership I still have plenty to learn.
It turns out I needed 4 of these beasties, 2 of which are shown here. That sorted it, a spacer each side, top and bottom rear engine mounts.

The next problem was I discovered that the back sprocket cover and speedometer drive gear which is enclosed inside the cover were for a 250 with a 16" rear wheel instead of the 18" wheel fitted to the 150 TS bikes. This explained why the speedometer was 10% out. I have managed to get a replacement drive gear (the two are different and therefore not interchangeable) but I do not have a sprocket cover and I have recently found out that they are made from that rare material unobtanium. I am not used to this with MZs, most parts are available off the shelf and there is a good chance that more will be made available as pattern parts at some stage in the future, but in the mean time I will have to find a second had one which is proving a little difficult. No doubt there is one somewhere.

I am very aware that there has been a lot on here about spannering and very little in the way of rides out in recent weeks. I did have a good ride out a week or two back getting more RBR clues but other than the clues themselves I did not take any more photos. I intend to remedy this soon, watch this space!