Z250SL initial fixing

It was the day after the night before, and time to see what I'd bought in the harsh light of day. Exhibit A, Your Honour:

The previous owner proclaimed to have never tightened the chain, which explained why it had managed to come off in the crash - it could be unhooked by hand. After standing on the breaker bar the axle nut finally gave way and the axle was moved back by a couple of metres..

This didn't cure the stiff links but at least it wasn't going to fall off any more, so it was a great improvement.

Next up was to find out why the numberplate was so blimmin' wobbly. Check out this load of guff that passes for motorcycle design:

I pulled the R clips and fitted a couple more washers to try and pack it all out, but it didn't seem to help. It turns out the wobbliness comes from some rubber grommets at the back of the plate which basically do not fit or work at all. Less than 24 hours into the ownership of my first Kawasaki I was seriously starting to wonder what I had done.

Next up was the front disc - the main problem. The first step was to pull out all the magnets that the Koso dash reads to calculate the speed, these are popped into the brake disc bolts like so:

Thankfully I have a collection of magnets, including this one from an old hard drive which is really quite fierce.

Don't ask me why there is copper grease all over the axle, I don't know. Soon enough all the magnets were removed!

I bought a Brembo replacement disc for just under £100 because of course I was never going to buy OE Kawasaki. Later I discovered that the disc is the same on the 300s and I believe the post-08 Ninja 250s, so perhaps I could've found a lightly used one somewhere for less. Oh well.

Still seems a lot for a laser cut steel disc but what can you do. A trolley jack under the exhaust header because this is a silly sports bike with no centre stand, a few bolts here and there, a quick wrestle with the frankly awful plastic speedo drive (really, it's completely plastic) and she was all ready to go.

I reused the paper gasket that goes underneath the disc because why the hell not, what does it even do? The bolts were torqued to about 20Nm but it doesn't matter because they all have varying amounts of threadlock left in them anyway. Moving on..

I ran the bike like this for 80 miles (during which time I was incredibly unimpressed by basically everything about it), by which time it emptied the oil sight glass. I placed a little faith in Kawasaki's basic engineering prowess and decided it must be due to the oil leak. Time to strip the plastic off and see what's up..

I decided to take a punt and see if I could tighten the bolts holding the clutch cover on, as that seemed to be the general area where the oil was coming from. There also seemed to be gasket goo underneath and around all the bolts, as if someone had tried to stop the leaking with goo instead of a new gasket or even doing the bolts up. Bizarrely I managed to get an extra quarter, sometimes even half a turn on each bolt and after this the leak stopped completely! I have no idea what has happened here, either someone who has no mechanical aptitude at all has been in there for some reason or Kawasaki have massively messed up during assembly. If you look closely you can also see a bolt has been replaced on the clutch cable bracket, the previous owner did this after the original fell out. The exact same thing happened to this chap so I really do wonder about Kawasaki's ability to tighten bolts.

During this I took time to marvel at the state of the frame..

What a mess of pressed and bent steel it is. No wonder they felt the need to cover it all up with a super cheap plastic thing! Plus all the water in the world is going to pool in that bottom bit, but never mind eh.. I'm sure it can't be that badly built. Right? Right??

Also, a tip for any unsuspecting Koso buyer - the magnets have different poles, you have to get them all the right way around! It took me a lot of fiddling to discover this..