KZ1000 oil cooler photos?

<Sorry if this is a repeat post, it does not appear to have posted after a
couple of weeks>

I'm presently looking for a "practice bike" to use for both drilling and
teaching police motor handling skills. I want to put an oil cooler on this,
possibly with a thermostatically activated fan. These drills are hard on
the engine/clutch and almost all occur at low speeds. I know KZ/KZPs have
had oil coolers mounted on them over the years by their owners and am
trying to track down some photos to see what the installation details
looked like. My preference is the KZP but any KZ will be welcome. APBM is
always a good place to post these things, so I'll monitor there and here in
case anyone has one. Thanks.

Mike


--
Mike W.
96 XR400
99 KZ1000P
70 CT70
71 KG 100 (Hodaka-powered)

 

On Mar 3, 9:11?am, Mike W.

Why don't you just install a large 12 volt electric fan so that it
blows directly at the air cooling fins on the engine, if you're
worried about overheating?

If you're riding around a parking lot slowly, you're not going to get
much air flow through a small oil cooler anyway.

And, since you are asking about how oil coolers were installed on
those older Kawasakis, you probably don't know that they weren't
hooked up
rationally at all.

The aftermarket kits would take oil under pressure off the main oil
gallery. There's a plug on the right hand side of the engine that they
would remove and
install a plumbing fitting to attach the oil line.

The oil line would be a neoprene rubber hose or a
trick-looking plastic hose covered with braided steel mesh.

That hose would go up over the engine to the oil cooler, which had to
be mounted ahead of the rider according to AMA rules.

Early superbikes that were run on the race track had a small oil
cooler mounted on the plastic tail piece, but the AMA outlawed that
installation because it could leak and oil the track without the rider
ever knowing what was happening.

You may still see WERA endurance race bikes with oil coolers ahead of
the engine, under the engine, in the fender well ahead of the rear
tire, and under the back of the rear fender. I counted about six oil
coolers on one GSXR-1100 at Willow Springs once.

Back to the bogus oil cooler installation on the KZ1000. Here's where
it gets seriously stupid. The return hose from the oil cooler (mounted
ahead of the engine) would go up over the engine and empty into THE
SAME OIL PRESSURE GALLERY near the oil pressure switch!!!!

In other words, there was NO PRESSURE DIFFERENCE between the two hoses
to cause oil to flow through the cooler!

What caused any flow at all, if both hoses "saw" the same pressure?
There was a thermosiphon effect whereby hot oil rose up one hose or
the other, and cooler oil descended back down the other hose.

Beats me which direction the oil flowed. Maybe the braided steel hose
radiated as much heat as the small oil cooler.

Oil in the pan would stay around 180 degrees, oil in the main gallery
would be about 240 to 300 degrees, depending on the operating
conditions.

Lockhart made a small oil cooler that looked like a little heater
core, Derale made a cooler that looked like an air conditioning or
refrigeration condensor with fins on large diameter tubes. Derale
coolers didn't do much oil cooling.

Racers would go to Earl's Supply for a larger capacity oil cooler. It
was thicker than a Lockhart cooler.

I suppose you could easily find an oil cooler for a 1986 to 1992
Suzuki GSXR-750 or GSXR-1100. They are really huge oil coolers.

How do you plumb the thing onto a KZ1000? You take oil off of the main
oil gallery, just like the old Lockhart/Derale/Earl's Supply coolers,
run it through the oil cooler, and dump it back into the crankcase at
the crankcase breather.

That way, you would get oil flow through the cooler.

But there's a problem with taking oil off the main oil gallery.

You don't want to rob the engine of oil pressure. That's a bad
mistake. You need to install a restrictor orifice in one of the
fittings. The orifice hole might be about 3/16ths of an inch in
diameter, but that's just my guess, you'd want to know about
how much oil pressure the engine was losing to the cooler.

The early 903cc Z-1 and the first KZ-900's and KZ-1000's had roller
bearing crankshafts and they didn't need much oil pressure.

But, I seem to recall that Kawasaki switched to plain bearing
crankshafts sometime around 1980. You don't want to rob too much oil
pressure from plain bearings and cam bearings.

The electric cooling fan I mentioned at the beginning would be a lot
simpler to install. So what if it used a lot of battery power while
maneuvering slowly around a parking lot?

It's not like you're going to be stranded somewhere alone if one
battery goes dead...

Big fans like that are used by hotrodders who take the steel or
plastic fan off their car engine and install radiators with attached
electrical cooling fans.

 

<Baffled>

Why on earth bother? Just get a modern machine like a water-cooled dirt
bike which will also be a damn sight easier to feet-up full-lock U-turns
on, as well.

Or do you actually *have* to use a 30 year-old dinosaur?

 

(The Older Gentleman) wrote in

He may need to use the bikes that folks are actually riding on the
street. My impression is that he's actually doing training for
motorcycle policemen.

But, you could presumably subsitute a water-cooled bike that is of the
same basic size and weight as the Kawa police bikes. (None come to mind,
though.)

Otherwise, I wouldn't fiddle with trying to convert the KZs to oil
cooling. I have an oil-cooled Bandit, and was surprised to discover that
there are additional oil channels/lines for pumping the cooling oil
around. They don't just pump the lubricating oil through a radiator.
Therefore, I doubt a retro-fitted oil radiator would do much.

A big-ass electric fan may be helpful. Still, you'd probably be better
off subsituting something water-cooled, though.

 

That Bandit led to a lot of surprises for you, didn't it, Mike?

Like the time you tried to torque down the cylinder head cover like an
obedient do-it-yourselfer, and snapped off part of a cam bearing cap.
Maybe you learned that you never torque oily bolts unless the manual
specifies lubrication.

And, there's a lot of things you probably don't understand about
Suzuki Advanced Cooling System (SACS), or any other oil cooling
system, for that matter.

Oil lines don't "pump cooling oil around", they are a conduit for oil
pressure and flow. The oil pump is driven by gears off the clutch
basket gear and the pump actually provides the pressure, not the oil
lines.

Many motorcycle engines have/had external oil pressure lines going up
to lube the camshafts, but SACS flows a lot of oil to the area above
the combustion chamber to provide intimate contact between the cooling
medium and the cylinder head.

Oil does NOT transfer heat very well, it will only absorb HALF the
heat that water will absorb. So, why did Suzuki choose oil, instead of
water for a cooling medium?

The cylinder head and block don't require water passages or a water
pump. And, SACS also squirts jets of oil up underneath the piston
crowns to cool the pistons.

Why would Suzuki built SACS engine for almost a decade and then
suddenly switch to water cooling, after all?

It was probably because of oil windage losses. What was squirted up
underneath the pistons had to come down, and the connecting rod and
crankshaft had to fight a rain of oil at high RPM.

Suzuki started turning the GSXR-series engine up to 13K RPM, as they
were originally intended to operate, before the bean counters refused
to authorize I-beam connecting rods that could withstand the stresses.

The engine had to find that excess oil windage, so the SACS became
history for Suzuki sportbikes. Only Kan O' Tunas, Bandits, and
GSX1100G's retained the obsolete SACS.

Nobody pumps the lubricating oil through a cooler. There would be too
much pressure loss. What they do is *bypass* a small fraction of the
hot oil through a small orifice.

The vast majority of the oil is used for lubrication in non-SACS
engines, and Suzuki used a differential pressure regulator to control
whether oil meant for the cooler was actually dumped right back into
the crankcase.

Shows what you know, Mike. My GS-1100EZ's oil temperature gauge was
inoperative when I took delivery of the new machine. I got to the top
of a mountain on my first sport ride and looked at the loose wire
dangling near the oil temperature sensor.

I connected the wire and turned the ignition key on and was horrified
to see the oil temperature gauge rise 3/4's of the way up the scale.

There were only a few numbers on the temperature gauge and the oil
temperature rose to what I figured was 280 to 290 degrees F.

I called up the owner of the $crewzuki $tealer$hip and asked him what
to do.

He said that $crewzuki should have never installed the oil temperature
gauge, that it just frightened new owners with the high readings. He
said to go ahead and ride it, but if the gauge pegged all the way out,
to put the bike on a truck and haul it to the shop.

I knew a lot of speed shop owners and magazine people, so I started
asking around about what to do. One semi-professional drag racer
recommended the Lockhart competition model with the braided steel
hoses.

And the Lockhart cooler did work, Mike. It lowered the oil temperature
down from about 290 degrees to about 240 degrees.

You want your oil temperature to reach at least 212 degrees to boil
moisture out of it. If your engine is using petroleum-based oil, you
need to cut your oil change interval in half for every 10 degrees over
240 degrees that the engine runs at.

During the winter time, the Lockhart oil cooler was too effective, the
oil temperature would only reach 180 degrees and the engine wouldn't
carburete properly.

I covered the oil cooler with duct tape in the winter.

Suzuki was using a partial flow system to the oil cooler on their
GS-1000S models (the one with the blue and white quarter fairing) and
that engine was set up with removable plugs for hooking up an oil
cooler.

All the subsequent GS-1100's had the same plugs, but Lockhart didn't
plumb into Suzuki's system.

Instead, they supplied an oil filter cover with an oil bleed notch in
it, to allow oil under pressure to bypass the filter and go to the oil
cooler.

 

And nothing whatsoever to do with noise/emissions regs, oh no.

You might as well ask: "Why did Honda (and everyone else) build
air-cooled fours, and then switch to water-cooling?"

Those old oil-cooled Suzuki engines were superb lumps: very reliable,
very long-lived. I mean, they've been around for over 20 years, so they
weren't as shit as you claim. They'd just had their day. Time moves on.

 

No, I will ask, "Why didn't Suzuki go *directly* from air-cooled I-4's
to water-cooled I-4's?"

And I will answer my own question with, "They thought that an oil/air-
cooled engine could cool just as well as a water-cooled engine,
because of the intimate contact between oil and the metal parts that
needed to be cooled."

Where did I ever say that GSXR engines were "shit"? GSXR fans who were
paying attention noticed that the production model 1986 GSXR-750
produced about 50 horsepower less than the 1985 GSXR that was running
in Formula I, but that was no surprise to anybody.

The street version had a rev limiter that kicked in
2500 RPM lower than the full race machine because Suzuki wasn't
willing to spend the money on I-beam connection rods.

Surprise, surprise. Yamaha was still not willing to install I-beam
connecting rods in their YZF-R6, last time I checked.

The R6 engine was able to withstand continuous running at 15K (2000
RPM past the power peak) because the rods were surface-hardened...

 

That's an interesting idea... I should see what is possible.

It's pretty low speed stuff and a practice session can last several hours.
One drill, which is to ride along the white line at as close to a stand
still as possible is a real engine/clutch abuser and that line can be
almost 100 yards long. You do breeze outs but I worry about accumulated
engine wear during the drills... the breeze outs feel a bit after the fact.
My interest was possibly mounting a cooler with a thermostatically operated
fan, like you find on trials bikes for the coolant.

This is one seriously knowledgable reply... many thanks for taking the
time.

Do you have any ideas as to where they ended up on the police bikes? Police
bikes obviously see severe duty and it seems to be a very logical
modification. I guess I could mount it inside one of the forward engine
guards but I'd SWEAR I saw on in the down tubes a few years ago and didn't
pay that close attention.

There's a bunch of photos of my bike here if you'd want to refer to one:

http://users.crocker.com/~mwilliams/My_P18.htm

I hope he got it up to a high enough temp to boil the water out of the
oil

I used to teach electrical engineering. I think I saw the electrical
equivalent this a few times.

If this works the way the heating loop in my den works when the check valve
craps out, the warm oil rises toward the cooler... so in that direction.

How was the connection to the crankcase breather made? Did you just fire
the oil back into the breather? If so, was there any downside to sealing
the breather off?

There's actually a device made to power strobes that will cut them out
before you eat the whole battery... would be perfect for this.

Thanks again... this was a great reply.

Mike


--
Mike W.
96 XR400
99 KZ1000P
70 CT70
71 KG 100 (Hodaka-powered)

 

Actually, I enjoy the bike I restored and prefer it MUCH more to any modern
bike I could own. I would hesitate to call it a dinosaur and as someone who
prefers an air cooled dirtbike because those guys who poke a hole in their
radiator or sweep a hose off 20 miles into the middle of nowhere, I don't
find the "modern" means "always better". For the kind of riding I enjoy, I
can pretty much kick *any* other bike's ass in this arena... the KZP was
the best close-quarters cop bike ever made, though I'd like to try out one
of the old Guzzi's someday. For what I need to do, it needs to be a police
bike and I'm actually looking for a second KZP.

This isn't quite representative of the sort of riding I'm talking about...
it's a video I made to look at one specific thing in my form (how well I'm
hinging). I'm pretty sloppy on a lot of the things I was playing at as I
never thought anyone other than me was going to see it. With that KZP, I
can tighten up the turns you see here considerably. 14' turn, or < 1.3
parking spaces, and move from max lock/lean to max lock/lean with great
ease. The shorter wheelbase makes threading through narrow place with a
breeze once you master what to do with the front wheel to control the track
of the rear.



I know... It's boring and gay and most will ask what's the point, but I get
to help train police and I find it both challenging and rewarding, and plan
to get into some competition this year.

Mike


--
Mike W.
96 XR400
99 KZ1000P
70 CT70
71 KG 100 (Hodaka-powered)

 

I spent too long restoring this and falling in love to get anything else
And there's nothing else in the cop world that can stay with a KZP. And my
God, they're just *gorgeous* and while a cager will look right thru a HD or
a BMW to see the car on the other side, that particular fairing gets the
attention of lots of driver's wallet-protection reflex and that's a leg-up
in the visibility department nothing else can give me.

Mike


--
Mike W.
96 XR400
99 KZ1000P
70 CT70
71 KG 100 (Hodaka-powered)

 

So you dodge the question again.

It worked well enough. And for 20 years or more.

You intimated it. You sneered[1], thought you knew better, and totally
ignored the emissions/noise issue, which I flagged up.

So who cares? Name a manufacturer who builds road engines to full race
spec anyway, apart from homologation specials like the RC30.

Now, any progress on the "Europeans buy diesels because they don't have
earthquakes" issue? Or on the "There are more commercial vehicles than
private vehicles on British roads"?

[1] You still are, actually.

 

OK, well, that's fair enough, in every respect. To be honest, I till
wouldn't worry, as the old Kawasaki air-cooled lump is the toughest
thing since Noah's Ark (and nearly as old....)

Run it on top grade oil and I can't see you'll have a problem.

 

I remember a movie in which Gene Wilder repeated
the same phrase (1), over and over and over.

It just doesn't matter what great strides European diesel
manufacturers make, if the products aren't cost competitive in the US.

Americans will probably be buying Chinese or Korean built diesels in
the future, because that's where the cheap labor is located. I doubt
that I will be seeing any Jaguar diesels around here.

And, in a blurb crawling across the bottom of my TV screen (as I
watched the unfolding drama of the demise of the fat gold digger who
inherited half a billion U$D), I noticed that the EPA wants diesel
particulate emissions reduced by 90% by 2015.

But I didn't make any effort to investigate the story any further.
Like Gene Wilder said...

(1) "It just doesn't matter", ad infinitum.

 

If you decide to go with the big fan idea, be sure to keep a close eye
on the plastic connectors that hook the alternator and regulator to
the motorcycle wiring harness.
Extra electrical load melts those cheap plastic connectors.

You could probably find some sort of thermoswitch that closes when the
oil temperature gets up around 300 degrees F, and it will get that hot
in the summertime. Just plumb the switch into the main oil gallery.

If you go to www.partsfish.com and look at the CRANKCASE diagram, part
number 92066 is the main oil gallery plug. You can see that the oil
pressure switch is right beside the oil gallery plug, and that's why
it was so stupid to return oil from an aftermarket cooler to that
point.

Dan Gurney modified a lot of KZ1000's for police use in the 1970's,
but I never paid much attention too them when they had me pulled over
for speeding.

I looked at the 2003 KZ1000P diagrams on www.partsfish.com and I don't
see any oil cooler on any diagram.

The KZ1000P still uses the old style roller crankshaft that requires
only a few pounds of oil pressure and still has cam bearings in the
cylinder head.

Some inexpensive cars had no water pumps, they relied on the
thermosiphon principle for water circulation...

Personally, I wouldn't want to disable the crankcase breather, but
racers wouldn't much care what systems they defeated when they
modified an engine.

There is probably a baffle plate inside the 14070 body, breather that
is shown on the BREATHER COVER OIL PAN diagram. It would be easy
enough to take the one bolt out of the breather body to see what
you've got there.

You could also drill a 1/4 or 5/16 inch hole in the camshaft cover and
return the cooled oil to the area of the cam chain tunnel so it could
easily flow back down to the crankcase.

You really don't need large diameter hoses (like 3/4ths or 1-inch) for
your oil cooler, unless you're counting on the extra cooling effect
you get from the hoses.

It might look silly to some unenlightened bystanders, but all you
would need is small diameter hoses to an oil cooler, since the flow
through the cooler has to be restricted in order to avoid robbing the
cam bearings of pressure.

 

One other point that I neglected to mention is that lean fuel/air
mixture madated by the EPA to reduce air pollution and allow imported
motorcycles to pass emissions tests cause the engines to run hot.

Opening the idle mixture screws 1/8th or 1/4th of a turn really helps
keep an engine cool in traffic on hot summer days.

It's a simple matter to drill a pilot hole in the EPA anti-tamper
plugs that conceal the idle mixture screws. Then you screw a small
sheet metal screw into the pilot hole and pull the plug out with a
pair of pliers.

Then you can open the idle mixture screws about 1/4 of a turn
counterclockwise and the engine will run cooler, start easier, warm up
faster, and have better throttle response.

You can tell if you have turned the idle mixture screws too far CCW,
the idle RPM will slow down.

The mistake that amateur mechanics make when they adjust the idle
mixture screws is they think the idle RPM should keep increasing as
they open the screws.

When the idle mixture gets too rich, the idle speed slows
down and they compensate by turning the master idle knob clockwise.

Then the engine idles far too fast when it gets warm and that drives
the amateur mechanics up the wall, since they don't know that the
extra gasoline that makes the engine idle too fast is coming from
three transition ports
uncovered too soon by the bottom edge of the throttle butterflies.

The corrective action for high speed idling is to turn the idle
mixture screws clockwise a bit, and then readjust the master idle
knob.

 

It wasn't "Put a cupful of Berryman's in the fuel tank", was it?

But they are...... And this is not what you were saying before.

Because you have earthquakes in California?

 

Heh. You talk my language. A close friend actually bought a Z1000P
here in the UK - a few have been imported privately and by used bike
dealers.

His still bore the Providence, Rhode Island stickers on its flanks.
Oh, and it had those weird tyres (OK, tires) that are designed to run
flat after being shot out.... The sidewalls sort of extend over the
edge of the rim.

He replaced the radio mount with a custom made pillion saddle, but
kept everything else, including the big police-issue speedometer. Only
problem was that it was very undergeared for some reason, and redlined
at something like 110mph. I've no idea if that was stock police issue
gearing or what.

 

So what else is in the cop world over your way?

Round these parts marked plod bikes are either Pan Europeans (Honda
St1100) or BMs (usually K12 or R1100RTs).

The unmarked traffic police bikes? There's a couple of Honda Blackbirds
and a VFR8 locally, Strathclyde over to the west have a silver ST1300
(with onboard video) and Grampian plod have (or had last year anyway) a
Ducati 999. I'm reliably informed that some of the English bike cops
have been using the new Fazer 1000 and there's at least one R1 police
bike out there.

 

Rhode Island rings a bell. Some of my ancestors were governors and
such in Providence and were controlling the future development of the
colony and the state, until there was an outbreak of democracy, and a
new constitution replaced the deal we made with Charles II in 1663.

Add motorcycles to the thought, and I get visions of
Jim Carey as a Rhode Island motorcycle patrolman with multiple
personality disorder. Remember the movie where his wife runs off with
a midget chauffeur and he has to raise three black kids but he never
notices anything?

The rims were called "clencher" rims and Goodyear made the special
tires, as I recall.

Shooting out a tire on a pursuing motorcycle is like a one in a
hundred possibility, *if* the shooter had an assault rifle and took
his time sighting on the tire instead of the officer.

High speed pursuits on Southern California freeways are too dangerous,
officers will break off pursuit if the speeds get up around 100 mph.

There's a freeway overpass on Interstate 5 near Newhall, CA that is
named after a motorcycle officer that was so dedicated to duty, he
rode off the collapsed ramp and fell a couple of hundred feet to his
death after the last big earthquake.

And that's why there are no diesel motorcycles in California ;-)

 

[Much assholery snipped]

I'm wrong quite often. I don't like it, but it can be a valuable way to
learn, and it's inevitable (nobody's perfect), so I try not to sweat it
too much.

While I may be wrong, at least I'm willing to admit it. But more
importantly, I'm not an asshole.

I don't know why you bother posting. You may be knowledgable, but there
are plenty of folks who are knowledgable and are *not* assholes. Guess
who people are going to want to talk with?

(Except of course for Murray--he's been bored ever since Koyt went and
died on him.)