Can I Fix This Unfixable Iconic Ninja Super Sport Bike?

The dealers won't even touch this one, and the local shops that did, made it worse. Nobody has been able to fix this bike, and it's too old for the Kawasaki dealers to even want to take a look at it. This is a 1986 Kawasaki GPZ1000R. Up until 1996, most people never heard of a Kawasaki Ninja, until Top Gun came out. And in one night, 2 million people discovered the Kawasaki Ninja for the first time. The customer complaint on this bike is it runs fine until it gets hot. Once it gets hot, the bike completely falls on its face. So step one is we need to recreate this issue. We're going to first do that by taking it out on a test ride. Then, once we replicate the problem on the road, I'm going to bring it back into the shop and try to replicate it here on the table. Well, this is going well. I thought he said the bike starts. Well, that's a problem. Really? Really. Well, we kind of replicated the problem because I tried to take it for a test ride after it got warmed up, and it wouldn't even let me ride it. And now what? Are batteries? Do you want to grab me the jump box in there? We'll see if we can. Yeah. Yeah, I can't get this thing to want to go. Okay, so it didn't take long to replicate this problem. If you see here, we are up at operating temperature. And once we got to operating temperature, this bike is just flat on its face. It will not let me go past quarter throttle without shutting off. So I made it eight feet. Obviously, we're seeing we have an issue. So now it's time to get this thing onto the table and start diagnosing it, see what we can figure out. I hear these motorcycles are really fast. Yeah. You want to see how fast? Come on, Craig, get to top speed. That was top speed, Danielson. And since it's hotter than Hades out here, we're going to be taking refuge somewhere with air conditioning. Look at this. This is from leaky fork seals running down. That's not good. We don't want that. But we're just here to get it running. I'm not going to worry about the fork seals. So it was super easy to replicate the problem when we went to test ride it. Once it got hot, the bike completely fell on its face. I'm leaning towards electrical issue. I'm going to start with coils and source coils and see what we can find out. But it seems like it's dropping probably two cylinders. So the first thing I'm going to do is take the tank off the seat, the tank, some of this plastic, some of the bodywork. We're going to be able to get inside here. And what we're going to do is run it again and get it hot and duplicate the issue here on the bench so we can start testing some things. And we're going to see what we find. But when I see stuff like this, look at that goo on that valve cover gasket. Look at that. See that silicone and stuff? That worries me. Like, what was going on in there? And if somebody did work in there, what kind of work did they do if they left this such a mess? You guys ready to learn how to diagnose electricals? Take inventory of what we have here. Ignition coils are up front. They're up in there. So I've got to get up in there as well. The way this ignition system works is underneath the cover at the stator, there's actually two source coils. And those source coils or trigger coils are what sends the signal up to the two ignition coils to fire. And then we have two spark plug leads coming off of each coil. One coil has the two wires feeding the outside cylinder. The other coil has two wire leads coming out, and those feed the middle two cylinders. So it seems like what's happening is when this thing is getting hot, one of the coils is dropping spark. That's my initial thought. It's definitely a good place to start. And that's kind of how this thing is acting. That's what we're going to do. Now that we have everything exposed, I'm going to take a mental inventory of exactly what we're working with. OK, let's see what we have here. We have an ignition coil up here. I have another one over here. First thing I notice is that coil is just flopping around there in the breeze. That looks like just, I don't know, does that look homemade? Like a homemade bracket here? Homemade. And it's not even supported on the other side. It's just, it's just that right there. I'm not liking anything that I'm seeing here in this coil. Let me look over here. Yeah, that's the same way. It's not supported on one end. Just some homemade rusty bracket. So that's not even, possibly not even giving a good ground. With the way the bike was acting, my initial thought was it's electrical, and right away I went to the coil. Source coils slash trigger coils, sometimes stators, ignition coils, that sort of stuff. Once you start introducing heat, they can really show problems. They can be fine. You introduce heat, that's when you start to notice some issues. So everything is leading to those. While the bike is still cold, I'm going to take baseline ohms readings of the ignition coils and the source coils. So first thing I'm going to do is pull these spark plug caps. We're going to test the resistance on the secondary windings, and then we'll test resistance on the primary windings of each coil and see what that shows us. Dan, can you hand me my multimeter, please? Maybe I will. Where is it? Oh, here it is. Thank you. I'm going to put these guys to work today. Ben, can you please grab my battery charger over there on the workbench next to my saws and an extension cord from over there next to the grinders? And we're going to get this battery on a charger. And we are going to end up replacing the battery, but for meow. I'm testing this right coil that's powering the outside two cylinders. And I'm testing secondary ohms, the ohms on the secondary windings. Those are your high tension leads coming out of the coil. And I'm getting 20.5k ohms. The book says between 10.4 and 15.6k. I'm at 20.5. So right off the hop, that's telling me that this coil is not checking out. But I'm going to write down what we have here, 20.5k on the right coil. Let's see what we have on the left coil. 20.65 on the left. So our secondary windings are high. Okay, so I'm checking my primary windings there. I'm at 3.8. And it's supposed to be between 1.8 and 2.8. And I'm getting 3.8. So what does that mean if it's too high? That means the resistance is too high. So that means there's a problem inside the coil. So that one's measuring high. And we'll double check this one over here. Yeah, 3.5, 3.8. So that's the same. So both the primary and secondary windings are ohmsing high. That's generally a sign that there's an issue inside the coil. But one thing I do want to do is I'm going to run this now. Get it hot. And we're going to see if we can get it to act up. And I'm going to pull spark plugs, wires, and see if anything changes. And that's just help confirming in my head that I'm on the right track. What makes this bike unfixable? Man, that's a great question. I don't know. I think it's partly just because of its age. There's shops out there that don't really want to touch this stuff. And again, you know, this time of the year, I kind of get it. You know, kind of more of a winter project. But still, it was at, like I said, it was at two other shops. They didn't get it figured out. And I'm not sure why. Like, so far this hasn't been too complicated. I think what happens a lot of times is they just don't know if they get scared or if they just don't want to take the time to read through the manual and investigate and figure out what's going on. That's very possible. For me, I kind of like that. Like, I, you know, spent a few evenings over the last couple nights reading service manual and running things through my head. Here's a fun fact. This tool here I got from a friend, Matt, a customer of mine, who actually introduced me to Sean a number of years ago. And that's how I met Sean. So every time I use this pliers, I think of him. Matt, not Sean. Now, remember what I said earlier. Adding heat to electrical components can change the readings. So now that we have our baseline cold measurements, let's fire the bike up, get it to operating temperature, and retest our readings. Breaking one of my rules here at the moment where, generally when you're diagnosing or doing electrical stuff, the first thing you want to do is start with a known, good, fresh battery. This is not it. It's just where we're at here at the moment. Okay, we're going to fire up. Dan, you're going to get a cloud of smoke there. Oh, okay. Let me show you what I mean by pulling the wire. So when I pull this spark plug lead off, you should hear a change in the exhaust tone. Hear that? Yep. So that cylinder's not firing. There, now it's firing again. So when this thing starts acting up when there's heat put to it, I'm going to pull that and see if I can narrow down to which is giving us the problem. What happened there? We dropped cylinders. Hear that? Is that cylinder like bugging in and out? Yeah. Okay, the battery is there. So that changed. Does that mean we isolated the problem? Yeah, unless I just ran it out of, unless it wasn't pulling juice, which it should have been. Now it's running on all. Okay, it's up to temperature. It should act up. Watch my heat gauge. It's getting a little hot. You're going to fan put on it. Of course, now it's not acting up at all for us, but we were losing spark is what was happening. So I'm confident in that. I'm confident in the fact that we were losing spark. Now it's just kind of a matter of why we were losing spark. I'm leaning towards ignition coils because they tested bad with the multimeter, but I do need to check the source coils as well. So we'll do that next. How many ignition coils? There's two ignition coils. There's two source coils and two ignition coils on this bike. There's not a chance that it's only one of them that's bad. There is a chance. Yes. So I was kind of hoping that, you know, like when it would act up, if I could isolate which one it was, but they're both testing bad. So I think what we would do is just replace both while we're doing it. And then that way it's done. I'm not sure what this is for. All right. Let's see if we can test source coils. Why would they hide it back here? That's not cool, man. Let's see here. Ohms. We should be looking for 376 to 564. Ooh. I'm getting mega ohms. We do not want mega ohms. We got to pull this fairing off so that we can get in here to check our source coils. They are ohmsing high. That's not good either. Probably once I open this up a little bit, I can explain how this is working a lot better. These old plastics are so hard to find and they're super brittle. So, like, it's just sketch. I don't want to break anything. Okay. So we'll knock those off. Take a look inside here. Yeah. Hopefully that's dry. There shouldn't be oil in there. We'll find out. There's going to be oil. You're saying that because it's dripping oil? Yep. That's why I'm saying it. Well, we're going to drain the oil because that needs to be done anyway. So these are the source coils or pickup coils, kind of interchangeable there. And this is the rotor. Okay. So what this does, when this piece passes one of these coils, that's sending the signal up through the wires to the igniter box, CDI type box, the igniter box, they call it on this, to the coil, to spark, to collapse that field and create that spark. This is what is basically controlling your ignition timing, is this little piece here, because this is going to spin when the engine's turning. When it hits that, that's what's creating the spark. So I wanted to open this up to check things out. Because they were ohmsing high, I thought maybe I'd find an obvious problem. I always like obvious problems. Like maybe the wires were shorting here. Maybe they rubbed on some metal or something and were shorting. What's that stuff? All right. Let's retest here. Black and yellow go to one. Blue and white go to another. Interesting. So as this is cooled down now, the ohms came back to within spec. So when we tested it and this was together and it was still hot, remember the ohms were high. Now that it's cooling off, the ohms are coming back in the spec. So that's a good sign. So right now I'm leaning towards what this bike should have is the source coils replaced, and I would actually recommend that we replace these ignition coils as well, just because they were testing bad. So now I'm inclined to go to the parts book, look at the parts, find the parts, call the customer, say this is what I recommend, see what he says, and we'll take it from there. Okay. We got most of the parts now to finish this up. We are still waiting on the source coils, but we have the ignition coils. So we're going to get those mounted up a while. One of the things I noticed here is these coils need to be grounded good in order to work, and this coil was just one bolt here held on with this bracket. Oh. So you can follow it down to here, and you can notice that's rubber mounted, so it's only actually grounding through the threads of this bolt, which is still a ground, but that's definitely not correct. Now these ninjas, there is an ignition coil bracket that bolts up under here to the frame and gives everything a good sturdy mount to tuck the coils up in there where they should be, make sure they're grounded good, redo a little bit of this wiring. We're going to replace these ends. There it is. Okay, got it. This is kind of tricky. Why did they mount the coils there? I feel like I could find better places to do this. Dispose some good wire, screw your spark plug cap on, and this one actually has another seal and a seal there. Put a little grease in there, help things pop off a little easier. What do you think, Dan? Can you change spark plug wires now? Yeah, just wires. Easy. You're like a computer guy. You can do coax cable and what's that other stuff? Cat fives. Yeah. That blows my mind. We got the coil brackets on, the coils are on, we got new trigger coil, new ignition coil brackets, new ignition coils are both on. We got new source coils put in, new gasket, everything's cleaned up. That's all back together. We're going to put some oil in it, gas to it, and we're going to fire it up on the bench and we're going to get this thing up to operating temperature and see how it acts. Once we have it up to operating temperature, what we're going to do is sink the carburetors. We're doing that. The customer just asked us to sink the carburetors, so we're going to do that. Then we got to put it to the real test because you don't know exactly how something like this is going to perform until you have it out on the road and are actually putting a good load under it that can act a little differently. First step, bench test. Next step, riding test. Craig, remember that time we were supposed to have a riding test, but it wouldn't ride? Oh, yeah. That was fun. That was the beginning of the video, wasn't it? It was the beginning of this video. Well, at least it'll be easy to know if we fixed it. It's not running out the bottom somewhere, is it, Dan? Let me look. I think we're doing okay. That would be upsetting. Let that settle. All right, let's get some gas. All right, gas can. Get the gas flowing. I'm liking all that. That one's hot. Okay. They're all hot. It's probably part of it, too, is just these open pod filters. You know, once you have everything over top of them, they're a lot more closed in. It's running a lot better. It's not running right. Let's see what our exhaust temps are. 220. 140. It means that one cylinder's not firing right. Ah! What happened? That was spark plug wire. Let's see what happens. Yeah, it's like we're getting intermittent spark. Here you go. A front row seat to watching a mechanic's day spiral out of control. I followed the steps. I did the testing. I replaced the parts. I did the thing. And now the bike is running worse. Was I wrong? Are the shop gremlins messing with me? Who knows, but down the rabbit hole I go. I'm changing spark plugs, syncing carburetors, checking the slides, making sure the jets are right. Never thinking that the solution to my old problem is now creating my new problem. It has to be something different, right? New parts don't go bad. Dan, is it the weekend yet? So after sitting and thinking a little bit about this thing, I realized we're probably having another electrical issue. So I ordered another set of OEM source coils because these off of eBay were not working. So I replaced it with a set of used OEM coils. I think the bike's going to fire up and be okay. Yeah, $40 eBay coils. Junk. I guess all there is to do is to do it, Dan. Who went to it? Let's turn the gas on. Just warm up a bit. We should probably open the door too. This is how we use tripods now. It is running so much better with those other coils in. So right now that's confirming to me that those eBay source coils were bad. The new coils we got were bad. Like I said, once we get it up to temperature and it seems to still be running right, I'll pull it off the table. I'll set the seat on here. I'll probably just hold my fuel bag somehow and we'll see if we got the problem right. And if it seems like all that's good, then I'll go and I'll put all the plastic on and we'll take it for a final ride and just to make sure it's perfect. Temp gauge is coming up. Temp gauge is up to operating temp. Okay, I don't want it to get too hot here on the table, so I'm going to figure out a way here. We got it up to operating temperature. Remember, it was so obvious like we could not even ride the bike. It would run on the table, but we tried to take it out and go for a ride and it would not even ride. So we should know pretty quick whether or not we're headed in the right direction and have a good fix. Going to get it back up to operating temperature. Okay, we are just over operating temp. Look, we're over operating temp. And we just had a more successful test ride than we did when the bike originally came in. So I'm happy with that. Now it's a matter of getting everything else put together and actually doing a final test ride to make sure everything's situated. So, we're going to get it back up to temperature now. We're actually going to get a little higher than operating temperature. We are above normal operating temperature. The bike is still revving out fine. Let's go for a ride. Well, so far so good. And this bike is good and hot now. So far, guys, I'm calling that a win. Got us out of the parking lot. Temperature's holding steady. Bike's still running good. GoPro fell over. I'm liking what's happening so far here, fellas. So far, it's easy to tell that this test ride is going a whole lot better than our first one. So I put about 10 miles on this bike. I cruised it around town. I cruised it through the country. And I even got it out on the highway and opened it up a bit just to see what this thing could do. I want to make sure it's ship shape before giving it back to the customer. And I'm satisfied. I'm calling that a victory. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe and check out one of these two videos right here. I know you're going to love them.