The Green Machine

But no one ever sees your tail lights!


All kidding aside that is pretty cool.

You are a man of many talents! Good job!

Well, as all of you know.....nothing I do or attempt to do is ever as easy as it seems.


There is a conversion that you can do to these bikes (the 1998-1999 zx9r) that involves installing the z1000 gearbox assemblies into the zx9. The gears are the same but cut better for the 1000 so that's why people do this swap. The 98-99 models were prone to 3rd gear failures due to poor designing on Kawasaki's part.

I didn't realize that I was given these gears when I got my bike. The previous owner had them for over a year, since he got the bike from the owner before. I had been putting off repairing my gearbox because I'm no bike mechanic and the thought of tearing it apart and performing all of this work on an engine I'm not familiar with at all scared the shit out of me. But I finally decided to tear into it. I really wish I would've taken some more pictures but I didn't, so you'll just have to imagine what I'm talking about 


So long story short, I installed the z1000 gearbox into my zx9r, you guys all know I started on it Friday morning and was pretty much done putting the bike back together around 10:30 Friday night (took a break to get my son and picked up a friend of his and went to dinner so that killed about 2-1/2 hours). My dumbass also didn't realize until after I had the bike back together that the gears were indeed the z1000 gears. Which means the output shaft where the clutch basket bolts too was too long. So I had two options, I could either cut the output shaft down to make it work or I could pull the bike apart again and swap all the good gears from the 1000 shaft over to the zx9 shaft. I took the easy way and decided to cut the shaft down.

I can tell you right now, this is a very doable idea. I put the clutch plates in, set the cover on the basket with the clutch lifter installed, and took a measurement of the distance between the inside of the cover and the outside of the last clutch plate. That measurement was 3/16". I marked the end of the shaft with a piece of tape, got out the 4" cutoff wheel and trimmed it down. Put the bike together, took it down the street and HOLY CRAP I've got 6 gears again on my bike.

There's some terminology that only a few of you will understand, I'm sorry for not taking any pictures. Besides, this isn't a motorcycle club so you probably don't give a shit 


The other issue I ran into was the clutch slipping. Took a couple hours to figure it out and a couple of phone calls to Grizzlyadams and a couple other people. The bike would pull up to about 3k RPM's then it would slip real bad. Ended up being the steel plates that sit between the clutch plates. They were about .020 of an inch thinner than the ones I pulled out and there was only 8 where there needed to be 9. Installed all of the old steel plates and the bike pulls great through all 6 gears. 

Now................time to ride!!!!!!!

I've been neglecting it because of all the work that had to be done on the thug. It's riding weather now, I can't wait to be able to shift into 3rd gear

Not a good way to ask permission

Yeah.. I showed him where his weak points were so he could spontaneously upgrade...

BAM!! You. Are. Welcome.!! ;-)