Joe Gresh – The ExhaustNotes Blog

The Big Dig

By Joe Gresh

One of the reasons we got such a good deal on The Ranch©️ in New Mexico is its location. Perched on the side of the Sacramento Mountains, the land is steep. Any flat areas are man-made so when you want to build a greenhouse, you’ve got to move some earth.

I’m filling the area beyond the wall. It was a steep rocky place and now you can walk around without stumbling like an old man…which I am.

Terracing is much easier than removing the mountain so that’s what we’ve been doing. The little cabin we live in is on a terraced spot down by the arroyo. The shed is higher up on another terraced spot.

There’s a great location for a greenhouse behind our shack and down closer to the arroyo. The spot gets plenty of winter sun and it’s protected in most directions from wind. It’s so low I suspect it may flood in heavy rains.

It’s a little hard to get to but the location will be better when the high winds kick up.

Unfortunately, the location is hard to get to. A while back I made a set of stairs to access the location but there’s no way to get the Kubota tractor down the stairs. I actually could get it in position via another route but it would require cutting a bunch of trees. I don’t want to cut trees.

That leaves hand digging. The ground is not too bad to dig. It’s much easier than the front of the house where I put a driveway. Down in the arroyo the ground is a combination of hard topsoil, mid-sized rocks and some whitish, proto-rock stuff that crumbles with a sharp blow from a 2-pound sledgehammer.

The land tapers from level. At the highest about three feet must be removed.

The process is: I break up the top layer with an electric, 35-pound jackhammer (powered by the Harbor Freight Tailgator generator), then I use a round point shovel to move the loosened soil into a wheel-buggy. A little work with a pick dislodges the larger rocks. Aside from a few tree roots, it’s the best digging I’ve encountered on the property.

Since the area is so steep I’m bulkheading off lower regions with some old roll-up garage doors and using the removed earth to level a larger pad. It’s like getting free land. I plan to fill about two feet deep of as large an area as I have dirt for.

This sounds like a lot of work and it is. I take it slow and steady. It’s really no worse than going to a gym to work out and you get the added benefit of a flat spot on your ranch.

The greenhouse is a cheap Vevor 10-foot x 20-foot hoop style. The hoops are 1-inch tubing that are assembled like tent posts. A through bolt holds the pieces together. The cover is a greenish plastic material reinforced with what looks like thread. I think the cover will last a couple years if we don’t get a hailstorm. It’s not a heavy-duty unit.

It’s a happy worksite. I take frequent breaks and enjoy the smell of freshly turned earth.

The foundation will be heavy duty. I’m building a two-block high pony wall to set the greenhouse on. The blocks are dry stacked, poured solid, and they sit on a 4-inch-thick footer. The footer has rebar to keep it together when it cracks. I’ve set some 1/2-inch j-bolts into the block cavities to secure the wood sill that I will screw the greenhouse tubing into.

The foundation is overkill because I’m assuming the Vevor won’t last long and I’ll be scratch building anothergreen house one day. In the meantime, I’ll practice my green thumb.

As the project progresses, I’ll post updates. There will be solar power and a water catchment system making the greenhouse off-grid. For those of you wanting to build your own greenhouse my advice is to start with level ground.

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The Wayback Machine: A Call to Alms

This is a rerun of a blog Gresh wrote a couple of years ago. Yep, we’ve got our palms out. Help if you can; we’d sure appreciate it!

By Joe Gresh

Sponsored content is a way for publications to earn money. How it works is companies pay cold hard cash for bloggers to write a story about the products they’re selling. Most reputable websites and magazines print a notice letting you know the story is paid advertising. We’ll never have to worry about that because we don’t write sponsored content.

Not writing sponsored content is not the same as not having sponsors, though. Sponsors pay money for advertising on our website but don’t have any say about what we write. Sponsors support the website because they feel the content will attract the sort of people who they want to reach. For ExhaustNotes those people will be motorcyclists, shooters, travelers (especially Baja travelers), and concrete finishers. I know, it’s an odd mix of topics, but Berk, me, Huber, and our other contributors write about what we know.

So here’s the pitch: If you have been reading ExhaustNotes and think the eclectic collection of stories we create might appeal to your customers, by all means become one of our sponsors.

Or, if you just like reading the website and want to help support us, become a site sponsor even if you have nothing to sell. Maybe we’ll make a wall of names for people who sponsor the site. We want sponsors to support ExhaustNotes.us because they think that the writing we are doing is worthwhile.

So dig down into those dusty advertising budgets and drop an email to us (info@ExhaustNotes.us). Let us know how we can help you spend your money.

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The Norge

By Joe Gresh

Winter has finally arrived here at The Ranch. This year it seems like we got a late start to winter in New Mexico. I was riding my motorcycle in 70-degree weather just a few days ago. The avocado plants have been brought in to protect them from the 20-degree nights and I have installed insulated faucet covers over the outside plumbing fixtures so that we don’t burst a pipe.

Wintertime in New Mexico is beef stew time. The best way to make beef stew is with a crockpot and I couldn’t find our crockpot. Actually that’s not true, I know where the crockpot is: it’s buried under a giant mound of Amazon cardboard boxes I’m saving for my future eBay business.

Having no traditional kitchen stove at the ranch I decided to utilize the Isiler inductive hot plate as a heat source for the stew. The isiler is a sleek looking, single burner, and inductive-heat unit. It only works with magnetic-metal cookware meaning aluminum and stainless steel pots won’t get hot. I bought a whole set of inductive, stainless steel pots to use on the thing. These pots have iron or steel cast into the base so they will work with the Isiler.

The iSiler is only a couple years old. I cooked breakfast with the hot plate two or three times before, a cast iron skillet works great on the thing. The inductive heat is really efficient as no heat is wasted heating the cooktop or surrounding atmosphere. Only the metal pot gets hot and it will boil water in a few seconds on high settings. I like to cook my beef stew slowly. I toss in all the ingredients raw, meat included, and let it stew on low heat for half a day or more.

Apparently the iSiler doesn’t like being left on for long periods of time at a low (180 degrees) setting. The thing kept shutting itself off. I would come in from the Big Dig to check the stew and the iSiler was not heating. A red H was displayed on the digital control panel. Turning the unit off then on restored the iSiler and it would start cooking the stew. The shutdowns were random. If you watched the iSiler it never shut down. It was like trying to cook on Schrodinger’s hot plate: go outside to dig a foundation for a greenhouse and the unit would die but you would never know it until you observed.

Luckily, I was in the house when smoke started pouring out of the ventilation openings of the iSiler. The whole cooktop was hot and I needed a couple paper towels to pick it up without burning my hands. I unplugged the cooktop and took the stinking wreck outside. The house reeked of burnt electrical components.

And this isn’t unusual for modern appliances. In the last few years we’ve burned up three Krieg coffee makers. The fan went out on our refrigerator. Our washing machine started leaking water and then mysteriously stopped leaking. It’s hard to find new stuff that holds up over time.

Which brings us to the Norge. In the 1970’s I bought a little house on Chamoune Avenue in East San Diego. Back then funds were tight and East San Diego was a cheap place to buy a house. The house came with no appliances; I bought a used Norge refrigerator for 50 dollars. In my tatty old neighborhood there were appliance stores that sold nothing but used or repaired equipment. At least three vacuum cleaner repair shops were within walking distance of my house along with mattress rebuilders, typewriter repair shops, TV repair shops, radiator repair shops and at least 10 Chinese restaurants. You could buy cigarettes one at a time. East San Diego in the 1970s was a hive of industry captained by small e entrepreneurs.

The Norge had a thick, heavy, single door opened by a gigantic pull handle with a ruby red emblem that looked like a royal warrant. The handle would not look out of place drawing cold, foamy Bass Ale at your local pub. Unlike new idiot proof, safety-first refers the Norge door latched closed and if you found yourself stuffed inside of the thing you would surly die because from the inside the door would not open. Even with dynamite. And no one could hear you scream. It was a solid refrigerator, man.

There was no fan to circulate air inside the Norge. The top freezer section had a small, plastic interior door and uneven distribution was accomplished by cold air falling to the bottom of the fridge. You could turn the entire interior of the Norge into a freezer by cranking the temperature knob down to its lowest setting.

I don’t know the exact year the Norge was constructed but it looked just like the ones built in the 1940’s. The only thing I could complain about is that the Norge needed to be defrosted occasionally, failing to do so would trap frozen items in the freezer compartment like woolly mammoths were trapped in Siberian ice thousands of years ago.

I used the Norge for 10 years or so and it was running fine when I sold the house with the Norge still in it. Still keeping food fresh, still cold, still deadly to small children. It was probably 40 years old last time I saw it. And I can’t get a hot plate to last more than 4 meals.

Maybe I have a skewed view of the situation. Did the Norge represent standard 1940 quality or was it a one-off, Hyperon refrigerator? So much of our industrial energy today is expended on items that are junk. It seems like a waste of resources. Worthless and uneconomically fixable items clog our landfills, where the iSiler hot plate is heading. You may note we didn’t include the regulation Amazon link to the iSiler. That’s because we don’t want ExhaustNotes readers to buy the thing and set themselves on fire.

I bought a new, analog hot plate from Amazon, the kind with the resistance coil that will heat all types of cookware. Sometimes I can fix things because it’s cheaper than buying new. But that’s almost never the case if you include your time. No, I fix things just to stick a finger in the gears of our throwaway society. Sure, it’s painful. You rarely come out ahead and you can lose a finger. I won’t be tinkering with the iSiler hot plate, though. I don’t want to know if the cat is dead or alive if it means burning down the house.

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ExNotes Product Review: Yonligonju Compression Tester

By Joe Gresh

If you’ve been keeping up with us here at ExhaustNotes you’ll know I had a lot of trouble getting Zed, my 1975 Kawasaki Z1 900, running correctly.

In between rebuilding the carbs and tinkering with most everything I could think of it dawned on me that maybe the engine was just tired. After all, it wouldn’t be unusual for a 50-year-old, air-cooled engine to wear out after 46,000 miles.

I used to have a nice compression tester that was at least 40 years old. In the big move west I can’t seem to find it. Maybe it got tossed after one of the many floods that inundated our house in the Florida Keys. I forget the brand but it had a flex hose and several adaptors for different size spark plugs.

I don’t need a pro-level compression tester as I’m not in the mechanical business anymore. This cheap, cheerful Yonligonju (say it three times fast!) Chinese kit on Amazon looked like the goods for less than 20 dollars.

The Yonligonju comes with a nice, blow molded plastic case that keeps all the little bits in order.

It amazes me how China can build such a nice kit for so little money. Including the quick release flex hose, this kit comes with adaptors to fit 5 different spark plug sizes.

In addition, the set came with two of the rubber bung type connectors. To use these, you just hold the compression tester tightly in the spark plug hole. It speeds things up on a multi cylinder engine. This works well enough if you’ve got enough hands for the job.

My Yonligonju worked well, showing 80-ish psi on all four Kawasaki cylinders. This isn’t great compression but the cylinder pressures were nearly even and Zed might have done better if the engine wasn’t cold. My Kawasaki manual claims 85 psi as the lower limit and Zed may get there warm. What do you want after 46,000 miles?

Besides compression, what you’re looking for with a compression tester is one cylinder being much lower than the others. This indicates a problem in the cylinder. The actual psi number is less important. Unless they are all really low…

Anyway, the Yonligonju gauge proved compression wasn’t the reason my Kawasaki was fouling plugs. See the latest Zed update for the full story.

The compression gauge held the reading without bleeding off for the few minutes it took me to look at it. There’s a pressure release valve on the side of the gauge that also worked as it should.

This isn’t a kit that will see a lot of usage. If you’re like me, a home-shop tinkerer, the thing will do the job for not much money. Hell, just taking your bike to a motorcycle shop once to test the compression would cost five times what the tool cost.

I think people rebuild old motorcycle engines more than is needed. Two-strokes especially get the piston, ring and bore because it’s so easy to do. Most likely the bike would have run fine the way it was.

For classic bikes that don’t see everyday use it’s enough that the engine runs well. There’s no need for a ton of compression with today’s crappy fuel anyway. I’m guessing the Yonligonju will last a while sitting in my toolbox waiting for another engine to test.

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British Motorcycle Gear Exclusive Offers!

By Joe Berk

Good news! Good buddy Andrew Capone, Isle Of Man empresario and British Motorcycle Gear baron is having an exclusive sale for ExNotes readers. It’s a whopping 21% off any BMG brand jacket. When you enter your order on the British Motorcycle Gear site, just add the code BMGJOES21 at checkout. British Motorcycle Gear also has great deals on Belstaff closeouts (as well as nice gifts in the $100 range) for under your Christmas tree. Andrew tells us that the 21% BMG jacket discount is 1% more off the sale he’s currently running, and that’s because we ExNoters are his kind of 1%-ers.

You read about Andrew here on ExNotes before. He’s the real deal and he’s a real rider. The latest issue of Motorcycle Classics magazine (Jan-Feb 25) is about to hit the newsstands, and Andrew’s magnificent Norton P11 is featured in it. It’s a great read about a great bike (I know because I wrote it). Pick up a copy when you get a chance. Or, if you have a subscription, you can read it online.

You’ve also read about BMG gear here on ExNotes. Joe Gresh tested several of their items, he’s a crusty old fart, and he gave all the British Motorcycle Gear high marks. You can read Gresh’s BMG reviews here.

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Zed’s Not Dead: We Get It Right The Tenth Time

By Joe Gresh

I like to think of myself as handy with a wrench. I try to fix most things even if I have no clue and oftentimes succeed. This Kawasaki 900 though, this Zed has been giving me fits. It almost makes me question my do-it-yourself mantra. Almost…

After initially getting Zed running a few years ago I enjoyed 4000 relatively trouble-ree miles. Zed had a slight hitch in its giddy-up right off idle but otherwise it ran fine. Then the bike started fouling spark plugs and missing. Occasionally gasoline would pour out the carb overflow tubes and a sharp rap with a screwdriver handle was needed to stop the flow.

So my first line of attack was the float needles because they were original and came out of corroded carbs. I went online and bought some cheap carb kits that included needles and seats.

Setting float height on carbs using plastic hose screwed into float bowl drain.

On a 1975 Z1 Kawasaki the carbs sit up high off the engine block so you can do a lot of tinkering without removing the carb bank. I changed all the needles and set the float height using the clear tube tool that screws into the carb bowl drain.

This didn’t really cure anything. Plugs were still fouling. I started to suspect an ignition problem. After messing with the points and several test runs I was getting nowhere so I purchased a new, aftermarket ignition system. They’re cheap, like $90 or so.

Carbs removed from Zed. A scene I got accustomed to. After the 4th round trip I decided to look elsewhere.

The new system came complete with new coils and wires. This was nice as the old coils were butchered by the previous owner. I installed the new ignition system and the bike still ran terrible and fouled plugs.

I rechecked the aftermarket floats and upon examination I found the needle seats miss-punched with what looked like lettering for the needle size. This caused a wrinkle in the exact spot the needle needed to seat.

.030 tool for setting baseline carb slide height.

Next, I bought new Mikuni needles and seats. I put the Mikuni stuff in and re-set the float levels. The bike ran like crap and foiled the plugs. At least I knew the ignition system was ok.

I was at my limit of understanding, my attention went back to the carburetors. I pulled the carbs, dismantled them and cleaned everything.

Zeds carbs sat like this for 2 years. I was befuddled, vexed, stressed right the “F” out.

I bought another, more expensive carb kit and new Mikuni enrichener plungers. The carbs were in a million pieces on my bench and I lost interest. Other things were happening, concrete need pouring and the carbs gathered dust for two years.

A few months ago I decided to get Zed running for the Motorado vintage motorcycle show up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Buckling down, I reassembled the carbs and using new rubber manifolds (the others had dry rotted in only a few years!) I slid the carbs back into Zed and the bike ran like crap, still fouling plugs.

I couldn’t get the bike running well enough to sync the carbs. A bad condenser was messing up two cylinders.

I took the carbs off the bike and went through them again making sure everything was spotless. And the bike ran like crap. Again, I took the carbs apart racking my brain over the flooding issue. And the bike ran like crap. I changed jets, I changed float heights, I swapped pilot air jets, I swapped emulsion tubes. The third time I took the carbs apart and triple checked everything the bike still ran terrible.

I was in the weeds bad-like and decided to think hard on the situation. I told myself that carbs aren’t all that complicated and that even if I didn’t get them perfect it should still run. And that the bike ran fine for 4000 miles with those carbs. That was when I decided to go back to the new ignition system.

One of the new points had a whitish coating. I thought maybe the bike sat so long the points corroded. Then inspiration hit me: the condensers! I checked the condensers with an ohm meter and found one of the two condensers bad.

I had started with one problem: fouling plugs and by using aftermarket needles I installed a worse set of needles. By removing the original ignition system I installed an entirely new problem with the bad condenser.

These two errors were compounded by my inability to believe that the new parts were bad out of the box so I kept rebuilding the carbs over and over.

The condensers on the old ignition system tested ok and I swapped them into the new plate. And the bike ran. Not perfectly because I had all the jets wrong in my attempts to make the bike run.

I walked the carbs back to their original settings. First the old slide needles and emulsion tubes went back in. Then the main jets, then the pilot jets until finally everything was back to where I started from two years ago.

Zed was running pretty good so I took a little 300 mile test loop. No fouled plugs. Stupid hurts and I was so damn stupid chasing gremlins that I was creating even as I was installing new gremlins.

Home built replica of the official Kawasaki carb sync tool.

Next up is a good carb sync and since parts are so crappy now I will try an electronic ignition system just for fun because I haven’t screwed things up enough yet. Stay tuned.

New electronic ignition. Only $68 on Amazon. Cheaper than points! What could go wrong?

Want to follow the initial resurrection of Zed? It’s right here!

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ExNotes Review: UABRLA Tire Inflator

By Joe Gresh

There’s a reason we call this pump a tire inflator instead of an air compressor. The thing is pretty small to start with and half of that size is battery to power the thing. Don’t expect to run your 1/2″ air impact wrench with the UABRLA is what I’m trying to say in an original, thought-provoking manner.

I have a small, 12-volt Slime brand tire inflator that I carry on whichever bike I’m riding. It works well and is like 15 years old now. The main issue (I hate to say problem because it’s more of a design limitation) is that you have to connect it to the motorcycle’s battery. On the RD350 that’s not a big problem but on some bikes, like the ZRX1100, the battery is buried under a bunch of junk I store on the bike. You have to remove the dirty socks, chucks of broken concrete, a dried up Sharpie marker and last year’s Laguna Seca vintage racing schedule. That gains access to the battery door, then you have to slide the battery out to access the terminals.

For airing up bike tires in the shop I use a larger 12-volt compressor (it has some grunt) and a 12-volt car battery.

I bought the UABRLA because I sometimes forget on which bike the Slime pump is stored. I’ve ridden off to the hinterlands thinking I had flat tires covered yet the Slime was packed away on a different motorcycle.

You’re probably wondering if I’ll ever get to the UABRLA review.

The UABRLA was delivered from Amazon in only two days. That’s pretty fast considering where I live. It came with a hose for connecting to tires, a charging cord, a 12-volt cigarette adaptor so you can keep filling tires even if the built-in battery is dead and a little collection of adapters for beach balls, inflatable mattresses and New England Patriots footballs. A handy tote bag is included. The unit also has a flashlight and a USB port for charging small electronics. The flashlight has three modes: on, on-strobe, on-SOS. Four modes if you count off.

The inflator has presets for car tires, motorcycle tires, bicycles and sports equipment. I can’t see the need as air is air but maybe if you were a complete novice it would help.

A nice touch is the auto-shutoff that kills the inflator when the tire reaches a preset pressure. The setting is pretty accurate being only a pound or two off when checked against a pencil-type gauge. Or maybe the pencil gauge is off. Regardless, I can’t tell a tire is low until the rim scrapes the ground.

The built in battery supposedly has 20,000 mah capacity but I can’t be bothered to test that. I filled up two bicycle tires and topped up 6 motorcycle tires with the little inflator and it was still showing 2 of 4 bars. I’m guessing you could fill one car tire with the built in battery. After that you’ll have to switch to the 12-volt cigarette adaptor.

Anyway, I wouldn’t use this machine for car tires. Maybe adding a few pounds would be ok. My experience with these little inflators is that they get hot if you run them too long so I’d let it cool a few times if you’re filling a 40-inch tall muddier tire.

One thing I would like different is a 90-degree air chuck instead of the straight chuck that comes with the UABRLA. It gets a little tight on some motorcycle wheels.

The UABRLA is a nice-looking bit of consumer glitter. I’ll be tossing this pump into my motorcycle travel kit and hopefully it will last more than one or two uses.

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ExNotes Long Term Test: Oxilam LED Headlight Bulb

By Joe Gresh

As you’ll recall from the Oxilam headlight review we published on ExhaustNotes a while back, I loved the thing. It gave a much brighter view at night and the light source was positioned in the correct spot for the reflector on the ZRX1100 Lawsonsaki. Low beam was wide and had a sharp cutoff so as to not blind oncoming drivers, and high beam lit up the dark New Mexico roads nicely.

Unfortunately. the bulb burned out on my bike after only 3000 miles. Considering the original halogen bulb lasted 35,000 miles, 24 years, and was still going strong, I was disappointed.

Taking the bulb apart revealed a neatly constructed circuit board, a cooling fan, heat transferring grease to the large aluminum heat sink, and broken solder connections at the main board/plug connector junction.

The board connections are tiny and I may try to re-solder the connections (there are four of them broken: two on either side of the circuit board) but I don’t hold out much hope.

The Oxilam kit came with two bulbs, and I’ll pop the other one in to see if my failure was just a fluke. I do like the quantity of light produced and riding with a plain old halogen seems dark now.

My new, revised rating on the Oxilam LED headlights is: Don’t buy them just yet. Wait until the second Oxilam has proved itself for 24 years. I’ll be sure to report back here if I’m still alive.

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ExNotes Review: Doremi Kawasaki Z1 Body Set

By Joe Gresh

Zed has been dormant for a few years. The bike has a running issue that has eluded my best efforts to remedy. But this story isn’t about my mechanical incompetence. This story is about Zed’s gas tank.

Back in the Zed’s Not Dead series I cleaned the tank fairly well using the apple cider vinegar method. The cider/baking soda trick works well but Zed’s tank was looking a little crusty after sitting two years with alcohol laced fuel inside.

I decided to give the tank a second cider session. All went well and the tank was spotless inside. I installed the tank and filled it with fresh gas. Checking the tank for leaks revealed none so I closed up the shed and retired to dream big dreams of fun motorcycle rides to come.

The next morning when I opened the shed a strong odor of gasoline hit my nose. Fuel was everywhere under Zed. The right side tank bottom was soaking wet. Apparently only the paint was covering pinhole rust-through spots. After draining the remaining fuel I ran a wire brush over the bottom of the tank, which revealed a ton of tiny holes.

My initial plan, because I can’t let it go, was to cut out the bottom of the tank, fabricate a new sheet metal piece to fit and then braze the new bottom into the tank. It’s a good plan and it might have worked.

Instead, I went with Plan B: a new set of painted bodywork from Doremi (a Zed parts supplier out of Japan). Doremi is resold by several different companies in the US. I chose Cycles R Us, an eBay seller because they had the correct year and color in stock and their shipping was only $39. Prices for the body set are mostly the same (around $1500 with some outliers at $1700).

I know what you’re thinking: that’s a lot of money for a cheap bastard like me. It killed me to spend the money but used tanks are going for $500 and new, unpainted reproduction tanks are $400. Not to mention a professional paint job on my repaired stuff would probably exceed $1200.

One of the good things about the soaring value of Z1 Kawasaki’s is that you can spend money restoring them with a good chance of getting your investment back (minus your labor)

Enough of the rationalizations: let’s get into the product. Opening the well packaged box from Doremi was breathtaking. The paint is stunning. I cannot find a flaw anywhere and I don’t think the factory Kawasaki paint looked this good back when the bike was new on the showroom floor.

For 1975 Kawasaki’s Z1 had two color choices, a metallic aqua-blue that was pretty and my bike’s color, a dark burgundy that looks almost brown in low light. The color pops deep red metallic when a single photon from the sun strikes the paint surface. The stripes are perfectly applied and I cannot fault the quality of Doremi’s product.

My kit came with new tank badges and a new gas cap, some resellers break these parts out of the kit and sell them separately.

The tank badges are flat when you get them and require gentle bending by hand to fit the curvature of the gas tank. This is kind of a trial and error thing. I got the badges pretty close but they still need a little tweaking near the front. I stopped bending them mostly because I was worried about messing them up.

The gas cap comes loose in another bag. Putting the cap on was pretty easy once the roll pin was test fit into the tank.

The gas cap latch was a little harder to install. The instructions were oddly worded and there are some notches you are supposed to file into the underside of the latch. The photos aren’t super clear and I could find no reason to file notches so I ignored the instructions and did it the way I wanted.

The main issue with the gas cap latch is getting the little torsion spring inside the latch then holding it concentric while the pivot shaft is slid into place. The instructions recommended using a small, flat blade screwdriver, I tried that but it was fumbly and the spring never ended up in the correct location.

The method I settled on was to compress the torsion spring and capture the two ends with a small tube (the interior metal barrel of a wire crimp connector) once you have both ends of the spring under control it’s easy to insert the spring and line it up with the pivot shaft.

The latch’s pivot shaft is sort of a rivet. After it’s in place you have to peen over the end. This is a two-man job as you’ll need to hold a weight against the pivot head on one side while rolling the other end. I’ll get CT to help me with this step.

The new side covers arrived without badges so I used the original badges. The old badges were in fair condition but I suspect the reseller removed the new badges from the Doremi kit.

The new tail section was a bit fiddley in that the bolt holes didn’t quite line up perfectly like the original tail. You reuse the original Kawasaki grommets and spacers with the new tail. Maybe new grommets would be softer and have more give. It took a little aggressive tugging to get all four bolts lined up and in place. I imagine the plastic will take a set in its new position and future fitting will be easier.

Zed’s original paint was in horrible condition, the bike had sat outside for an indeterminate length of time. Talk about patina. I cleaned up the old paint as much as I could but it was tatty and dead. The Doremi body kit transformed the bike: it looks like a new, 1975 Kawasaki Z1-B. The bike is beautiful in the sunlight with the perfectly smooth surfaces changing color as you move about. Damn, this bike looks good.

Is the Doremi body set worth $1500? If your old stuff is rusted, yes. Even if your old stuff is in good shape you’d be hard pressed to find a painter who could lay down a beautiful job like Doremi for $1500. It’s like you’re paying for a paint job and the bodywork is free!

I recommend the Doremi highly. If we had a rating system at exhaustnotes it would get top marks. If you want your Z1 to look like a new bike get the Doremi.

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Inbound!

By Joe Berk

We’ve got a bunch of good stuff coming your way, my friends. I just finished a whirlwind week in New Jersey, we hit some of the Sopranos film locations, I grabbed a bunch of very cool Norton P11 photos, we saw where Bruce Springsteen was setting up for a concert in Asbury Park, I have a review on the new Garmin chronograph about to go live, Mike Huber (aka Mike Nelson) is down there in Indonesia and Thailand becoming one with the sea turtles, I’ve got a review on Ruger Customer Service and my revamped .357 Bisley, Joe Gresh has his Z1 Kawi all dressed up with lots of new places to go, and lots, lots more.

Andrew Capone, Isle of Man impresario and British Motocycle Gear CEO, with an unknown paparazzi reflected in a Norton Scrambler fender at an undisclosed location in New Jersey.

All dressed up with lots of places to go…Joe Gresh and the Z1…the gift that keeps on giving!

How fast is fast? Stay tuned, and we’ll tell you!

Bisley mania! Plinking at 100 yards with a handgun? You bet!

Andrew, Harry (aka “the Norton Whisperer”), and what is unquestionably one of the most beautiful motorcycles ever made!

There’s ink, and then there’s Sopranos ink. Oh, do we have a story for you!

You know, we blew right by 1500 blogs some time ago, and I started to wonder if we were going to run out of things to write about. Nope. Not gonna happen. It’s like when one of my geezer buddies told me he didn’t know what to say at a lunch gathering, and another of my geezer friends told him, “Don’t worry…you’ll keep talking until you think of something.”

Stay tuned, my Amigos…

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