1993 Ninja 1100

[Merkid]

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Does anyone have any experience on these models ?

Reason to ask is a buddy of mine has had one put away for a number of years in his unheated garage. He doesn't recall prepping it in any way and sure enough, flat tires front and back, tons of dirt on it from the lack of a bike cover, some surface rust thru-out, even the battery was still sitting in it so I assume it would mean a lot of work to clean it up, It is not seized so that is good.

My last Kawasaki was a '72 H2 750 triple which I never should have sold even tho I almost died on a number of times in my stupid youthful days ... lol

I have restored a few of the early '80s GS1100's which had a great parts supply and had a bullet proof engine. That was a few years back and i had more patience in those days but i am asking anyone if this Kawasaki had any mechanical faults and/or lack of parts availability that would set back a resto project on it ?

Thanks

 

[TK4]

Re-doing the carbs is a horror show. Make sure you have all the parts beforehand.
There are a lot of oddball o-rings and gaskets holding the intake manifolds on, and get top quality carb rebuild kits or they will leak for sure.
If there is any rust at all in the tank get it stripped and resealed.

 

[RonnieRev]

Basically the same engine that is in a ZRX, very durable engine and easy to work on

 

[TwistedKestrel]

Will start off by saying I love this bike. It can fit modern radials (uses the standard 120/180 sizes), has a HUGE gas tank, sounds great, and while it is no longer objectively fast ("only" goes to 174mph) it still feels like the throttle is connected to something nuclear. Valve adjustments aren't bad - it is not shim under bucket, but the shims are in cam followers. (The shims are tiny though - don't drop them down the cam chain tunnel) And it has a centre stand!

There is one stand out mechanical fault - from the factory the oil feed hole in the #4 main bearing is slightly misaligned, and so that and #3 rod have lower pressure. It becomes very sensitive to oil starvation, and so #3 rod bearing frequently gets spun. There are two ways to fix it - one was an oil pan modification that just fed more oil to #4, and the other was to do some drilling to fix the restriction. This post talks about the first fix but does not acknowledge the second: zx-11 #3 failures - Interesting Westech Article

Some shortcomings (not faults) are that the stock suspension kinda sucks (prior model had an external reservoir for the shock - they couldn't figure out a good place to put on on this one, so they just eliminated it!). The factory exhaust is shiny and durable, but weighs a TON. When taking things apart, pay close attention to how all the fuel/vacuum hoses/ignition wires are routed, because there are MANY and you can easily mis-route one and then suddenly you can't fit the airbox or fuel tank back on. Bike originally had a re-usable foam filter I think - check that it's not disintegrated BEFORE firing it up.

I don't know that rebuilding the carbs is substantially worse than any other inline 4, but removing them and re-installing them is a headache.

 

[timtune]

As for the Carb R&R. Be sure to remove the airbox and whatever else is possible first. I once manhandled a set of carbs off a CB750-4 w/o removing the airbox ( I know unbelievable but I did) I didn't know the airbox came apart and off in minutes.

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