Kawasaki Z250

No further progress was made on this project during our 11/06 meeting. At the previous meeting the bike’s air filter box reluctantly allowed itself to be re-fitted with the aid of a lot of ingenuity and hot water. In fact the carb to air-filter box rubbers had to be pulled from the air filter box and heated as much as possible before they could both be fitted onto the neck of each carburettor. One had shrunk so much a couple of cuts had to be made in it to get it to fit at all. The air filter box was then pushed forwards towards the carbs as the rubbers were fiddled back into place in its openings. Careful testing of the rather tatty wiring helped to identify the purpose of most of it. However despite all the connections being made (Or at least so I thought) to get the starter motor spinning nothing happened when the starter motor was pressed. The best thing to come out of this, was that we discovered that the starter motor could be removed without fully removing the carburettors. Pushing them back and pulling them up and out of he inlet manifold gave just enough clearance once the cover had been removed from the cam-chain tensioner. This allowed for a substitute starter motor to be tried and the brushes checked on both motors. Despite all this there was still no life in the starter motor. Having applied some more thought to the problem, it dawned on me that the Z250 engine was rubber mounted and needed an earth strap. The earth strap was located and re-fitted and quickly got the starter motor spinning. We have reached the point where we have current running to the positive side of the bike’s brand new coils but no current running through the negative side of it to the points and onwards to earth when they are closed. A little more work is required to overcome this and to properly tidy up the wiring. I believe that a set of re-chromed front fork stanchions has now come back from the chrome plating company for this bike.