Project 1992 Kawasaki ZXR250C

Making a project thread as I usually do for new projects.

Picked up this ZXR250 in a swap after the previous owner had the carbs cleaned then could not keep the bike running after replacing them again.

Apart from the black/blue/silver/gold/red/green colour scheme and the Kwikasfuki stickers it seems like a fairly tidy bike but the mileage is getting up there at 67k kms.

I haven't had much of a chance to investigate but initial findings are there is no air filter, the petcock is leaking quite badly, and the choke cable hasn't been hooked up correctly. Hopefully after fixing these things it'll fire up and everything will be fine.... yeah right.

 

I'm pretty sure I've ordered all the parts I need to get this running. There were so many obvious things wrong with it. Also I'm going to strip and clean the carbies again. The mixture screws were about 1.5 turns out, the choke wasn't hooked up correctly and missing washers on the slide, no airbox seals, visibly out of sync, missing bolts on the airbox..... no wonder this thing wasn't running.

There were no seals between the airbox and carbs. It looks like he's used bearing grease to try and seal it? This has caused a mess in the carbs.


One of the vacuum lines for the petcock wasn't hooked up as the rubber is too perished to stay on. This is the case for most of the vacuum hoses so I'm going to replace them all.


Final list of things to fix:
- New air filter
- New fuel filter
- Petcock leaking
- Carbies need to be cleaned and rebuilt properly. Float needles are visibly worn, gaskets are perished
- Airbox/carb seals
- One throttle cable frayed
- Cam cover gasket is leaking
- Replace perished vacuum lines

Also sprockets and chain will need to be replaced in the near future but I'll get the bike running again first.

So now I just have to wait for everything to arrive. More updates in a few weeks.

 

Air filter and carb kits arrived today. Guess I'm rebuilding some carbs over the weekend.

 

Progress update time. Carbs have been rebuilt, got them back on the bike, cranks but no start. Feels like it doesn't have spark. Also the headlight stopped working while cranking so tomorrow time to check fuses, spark plugs, and valve clearances.

The carbies looked like in no way had they been 'professionally' cleaned. They weren't the worst I've seen but they were pretty dirty. Also he had the main jets mixed up.

 

Well there's definitely something electrical happening then. When I first tried to start it the headlight would turn on when I turned the key to on but would turn off while cranking. After a couple of cranks the headlight wasn't on at all.

 

A bit more progress after today's troubleshooting.

Wrong spark plugs were in it, CR8E instead of CR9E. This shouldn't have prevented it from firing but they were pretty fouled. So much for plugs being 'recently' replaced. I threw some new plugs in and found out I didn't have any spark on cylinders 2 or 3. I was suspecting a bad coil but it checked out OK on the multimeter. So I pulled both of them out and trimmed the leads, this fixed the no spark problem.

After a bit of stuffing around I managed to get it to start. Unfortunately it was really hard to start cold and runs horribly. I haven't done any carb syncing or tuning yet and the airbox was still off so this was contributing. It idled alright but any throttle it would go up to about 6k rpm and slowly die. Second vid below shows this.

Still more troubleshooting to go yet. Valve clearances to do next.

 

Also I noticed that someone in the past has tightened an airbox/carb screw too tight and cracked the carb and snapped the bolt off.

This obviously isn't good but apart from a possible vacuum leak do you think it's going to be a big deal?

 

Yep, bit unsure what it's going to take to get this running right at the moment. Plans for this weekend are split the carbs apart as @Linkin mentioned and replace the o-rings for fuel and vacuum connectors, bench sync the carbs properly, check the valve clearances, and do an oil change.