First Bike- 1980 KZ750 H1 LTD-4

Late this past fall I got my first bike, a 1980 KZ750, off of craigslist. The deal was for a working 1980 LTD-4, a 1982 LTD-4 in pieces and enough parts it looks like to build another engine.
I have limited experience mechanically with cars, but zero with bikes and thought having a working bike while being able to play around and learn on the second would be a great opportunity.
Here is the bike right after I got it home.


After some lurking here I got up the courage to swap seats, remove that sissy bar, and put on some lower handle bars. I also swapped the rear wheel with newer sprocket and brake disc from the parts bike to the working one.
Here's how she sits today:


I've got a bunch of parts coming this week, new cables for the shorter bars, and brake lines, so I'm sure the questions will be coming shorting.
Thanks all for the help so far!

Nice bike and Welcome.

I noticed your sissy bar is for sale, how about your seat?

I have two and the seat in the top photo, the two piece seat I would sell. Would you be interested in both the bar and the seat?

Just the front rider seat of the two piece seat.

I'd prefer to keep or sell the whole thing as one....I'm on the fence about building the parts bike back up so I'd like to have the whole seat or have to buy a whole new one without having the extra half sitting around.

Hey, that's what my bike started out as, 1980 KZ750-H1.

I rode it around like this for years, making little improvements here and there...



Then I got a wild hare made BIG changes...



At this point, the only things original to the bike are the wheels, frame, and most of the top end. There are pieces from probably twenty different bikes in there now.

Wow, that looks really nice. I love the red frame. It looks like you have the front turn signals mounted on the forks.
I would love to do the same thing since I have no room on the lower bars I installed, how did you mount them?

Bdpowers wrote: Wow, that looks really nice. I love the red frame. It looks like you have the front turn signals mounted on the forks.
I would love to do the same thing since I have no room on the lower bars I installed, how did you mount them?

Oh, I just attached them to the headlight bracket, then used zip ties to keep them from flopping around.



Just last night, though, I finally got rid of the big, friendly yellow blobs and installed a nice set of LED bullets.

I like those LEDs! Ya i have mine set up the same way with electrical tape at the moment. Is there special LEDs to look for or a relay to make them work right? Thought i saw somewhere that they don't pull enough to flash on their own....I don't know enough about the electrical side of things yet.

I installed a solid state flasher.

Old-timey flashers (the kind we grew up with, that make the clicking noise) use a bimetallic spring in the circuit. It's normally closed, which allows current to pass to the light bulb. When current passes through the spring, it heats up and curls slightly (being bimetallic, one side expands quicker than the other side), thus opening the circuit. In a moment, the spring cools, straightens out and closes the circuit, heats up again, and so on.

This operation relies on the resistance of the bulb's filament to work, which is why people put load resistors inline. Solid state flashers have no moving parts, and they don't care what the resistance is, they're going to flash at the normal rate no matter what kind of bulbs you use.

This is the one I spliced into my wiring harness.

This one should plug right in.

Great! thanks for all the info!