Having off-loaded my BMW R100/7 for a rewardingly large amount of dosh before I fell asleep out of boredom and fell off, I was caught in the usual trap of wanting to ride a motorcycle and waiting for a bargain priced bike to turn up. I had about £1500 to play with, not quite enough to buy some high tech joy rider, but quite sufficient to pick up some older tech Jap multi with plenty of miles left before it chewed up its cam bearings or dropped valves on pistons. I rather fancied a Z1000, one of the older ones with the teardrop tank and it was whilst flicking through the smalls in the World’s Largest Selling Motorcycle Paper that I came across the Z1300. The usual line, immac condt, low mileage, must sell, getting married, etc., etc. I'd wandered along, been taken for a terrifying blast up the road and after I’d admitted to having the money on me, been allowed to disturb the tranquillity of surburban Hayes for a couple of minutes.
Everything seemed just fine, but somewhere at the back of my mind was a nagging doubt that stopped me making an offer. Three weeks later there was still nothing decent on offer, so I phoned up, offering £1250 for the 1984 Z1300. He accepted and in about an hour I was the proud owner of the kind of motorcycle that I really should have been trying to avoid at my age, but what the hell.
I’d had the thing for fifty minutes, running up and down the A1 just to get used to the beast when I thought I heard a funny ringing noise from the engine. Naturally, I whacked open the throttle to see if 120 horses would clear out the motor, it certainly nearly cleaned out my body, what kind of a lunatic puts the bars and footrests in the kind of relationship that might suit Fantic chop owners on a device with enough go to rip the arms off inexperienced wimps?
Unfortunately, the noise was still there. It was whilst stuffing my earhole as near as possible to the engine while doing about 40mph that the pig mobile gave me a blast of its siren sufficient to scare me out of my skin and provoke the kind of wobble that would make Vincent owners go all misty eyed.
Either it was something I’d eaten, or the officers of the law actually looked rather porcine. I don’t know about cops making you feel old, these made me feel positively handsome. These characters really tore into the old Quack, trying to rip off the forks, tank, seat, swinging arm and anything else they could grab hold of without dirtying their fingers too much. I wouldn't have been surprised if they had started wielding crowbars on the bike. After checking my name against their computer, they let me go with the usual warnings and demand to take my documents to the local cop shop.
At idle there was just a quiet burble, the ringing noise came in around four grand and disappeared after 6500rpm. There were also rumblings from the clutch/gearbox area and the clutch lever was as heavy as a Norton Commando item. Just for the fun of it, I took the Z1300 to the local Kawasaki dealer who ummed and arred for about ten minutes then tried to persuade me to trade it in for a new 900, finally letting one of the mechanics have a listen who reassuringly admitted that they all did that, mate. Oh well.
Wading through Cockroach City traffic I was constantly aware of two things that were not in the least surprising. The bulk and width of the bike made hustling through gaps in traffic fraught with the kind of kicks reserved for Charles Atlas proteges, whilst hitting one of the many bumps in our rotting roads led to the tiniest of throttle movements and the sudden application of a frightening dose of horsepower to the rear wheel; combine these two factors and it’s very easy to end up bucking and bouncing along like your trying to train some wild horse.
Things aren’t helped any by the directness of the shaft drive (but just think about the kind of chain wear it’d have if it wasn’t a shaftie) and the amusing way the front brakes grabbed on and off with all the predictability, of kick starting a Gold Star into life. Furthermore, kids, when the front brake did bite, the twin discs locked up the wheel with a great squeal that had the softly, softly, forks down on their stops. It was only because I’ve ridden much worse bikes that have combined the above traits with a brutal delivery of power that I’m still sitting here writing this.
There are a couple of things that stop the Kawa being a dismal failure. For a start hit 75mph in fourth, wind open the throttle and the six cylinders come on cam and the bike shifts with a delightful growl and enough arm wrenching to satisfy the most perverse amongst us. It'll cruise at an indicated 120mph with no trouble and no vibes, even if the snakey little weave rather inhibits higher speeds, although top speed is more limited by the inability to hang on than the latter constraint. But the most important aspect of my ownership of the Z1300 is that in six months and 12000 miles (I commute between London and Belgium every week) all that I did to the bike was change the rear tyre twice and the brake pads three times.
The latter was necessitated by the need for constantly losing 30 or 40mph off speed when diverging from the straight and narrow. Just knocking off speed can get a little frightening if you're doing, say, 110mph in the mild weave mode, then brake down to seventy because if the road is merely mildly bumpy the chassis will get all crossed up. Try entering a bend in this mode and it’s dirty knicker time. At the best of times, going into a bend on the right line at the right speed the Kawa often flies around as if on rails defying expectations of the breed, but if it hits a bump in a certain way or some clot in a car gets in the way then it’s party time again - the steering head will shake, the back wheel weaves and... and if you whack open the throttle, hold on for dear life, it’ll all straighten out by the time you hit the exit line - on a good day.
Somewhere in there, amidst the excess mass, spongy suspension and laughable riding position there are the basics of a decent handler I think. At least the steel duplex frame is hefty and the steering geometry somewhere near right. I know it goes against the grain to say it, but I found the combination of frightening handling that never turned fatally terminal, with the immense grunt of the motor and the echo of. the six cylinder exhaust note, all quite thrilling.
Where my last bike, a R100/7, positively demanded that the rider behave in a civilised manner, no such constraint was evident in the Z1300, although if you really insisted on being perverse you could lope along at anywhere between thirty and seventy in top gear without any hint of displeasure from either the engine or the drive train.
Let’s be quite honest about this, the Z1300 was never conceived as an all out sportster, it was more the natural climax of a line of reliable if stodgy tourers in the GT550/750 mould, but as a tourer the bike is so ridiculously overweight and so heavy on consumables for high mileage use that it’s just one big laugh as that kind of serious motorcycle. OK I suppose, if you need to tow a caravan, but why buy a Z1300 to travel at 70mph (which is as fast as most tourers could manage without frightening themselves) when a machine half its size will do just as well?
I see the Z1300, instead, as the last in line of basic, raunchy devices like the Z1 and old 500 triple. It has the same mismatch between power and chassis that many perverse people actually enjoy in these days of sophisticated multis.
Despite the wonderful reliability that I enjoyed during my ownership, this was probably more a result of the beast having a mere eight thousand miles of mild usage before I got my greedy digits on it, than any particular comment on the nature of Kawasaki engineering, which is more a myth resulting from their older fours than yer actual ownership of their more modern tackle - just mention valve gear to a GPz600 or 900 owner after he’s got twenty or so thousand miles on the clock if they start sniggering at your seventies runabout.
The Z1300 has a few trouble spots that should be examined with a modicum of care. Start with the electrics. Both the ignition and alternator can give problems. The former causes total failure so is easy to suss, whilst riding with the lights on should quickly highlight failures in power generation.
Transmission also causes the odd problem - clutches that burn out and some of the bearings in the shaft drive start clunking - neither fault is cheap to fix. If the motor’s been stripped down and carelessly rebuilt, it’s quite easy to warp the cylinder head, and the inaccessibility of the spark plugs in dodgy Jap alloy also lead to stripped threads. Best to avoid an engine that has been stripped. If the five speed gearbox is very clunky it’s likely the selector’s on the way out, but even new the box isn’t particularly smooth. Expect to replace the camchain around 30-35000 miles and do a rebore at 55-60000 miles. Cranks do go at around 40000 on hard ridden bikes, but this is rare.
Maintenance could be very complex but as I never did any I can’t really comment. I just changed the oil every 3000 miles, checked the water level and occasionally polished the alloy of the fuel injection units in reverence to their complexity and the mortgage needed to buy replacements if they went wrong. As the kind of chap who used to rebuild his Commando engine every other weekend, this is rather surprising behaviour, but then why bother playing around with engine internals if you can get away with neglecting them... after its 12000 miles of neglect the engine sounded no worse and appeared to run just as smooth and produce just as much power. I even sold it for a couple of hundred quid more than I paid for it.
If in all it was a pleasant enough experience, not one that will linger in my mind for a long time, unlike certain Nortons. I’m happy to say that my next bike will have a chassis to match its power and my kicks will be from speed rather than dire handling and if you think that’s going to make for boring reading then you couldn’t be more wrong.
Johnny Malone