Expensive lessons

This is more of a rant and about kicking myself in the rear more than anything else. A while back I bought an all original, completely stock 1975 H2c Kawasaki triple. It is by far, the rarest of all the triples ever built and the bike is a beautiful deep purple which accents the chrome perfectly.
After buying the bike sight-unseen from a seller on the other side of the country, I awaited delivery though a shipping company I had hired to pick it up for me.
When it arrived I was pretty happy but a couple things were not in the condition I had expected as I recently wrote about here when I finally found the correct parts to replace them.
Initially, I was going to “build” the engine so I removed the top end and sent the cylinders out to get decked so I could port them. 2 days later I bought a second H2 that was not all original and decided at that point to deck the second set of cylinders and keep my first set “original”. The shop sent me back my first set untouched but while waiting for the second set to get finished(5 weeks), I couldn’t keep my hands off the first set and I ported the cylinders to what most guys would call, stage 3. The engine runs great but it’s no longer “all stock” or all original. I’ve been searching ever since, for a set of cylinders with no broken or cracked fins, on the stock bore. Occasionally, a set would come up on fleabay but they were always over-bored or had a broken fin or something else wrong, yet they were still selling for 650-800, even up to $1000 a set! Uh oh, this was turning out to be an expensive “couldn’t keep my hands off of them” deal.
Finally, after searching for nearly a year, I found a perfect set for the “buy it now” price of $399. I wrote the seller asking what the bore size was and expecting to hear back that it was on the 2nd, 3rd or even the 4th over-bore. I was very happy when he answered my note within 5 minutes that they measured 71mm, stock bore! Of course I bought and paid for them as fast as I could type.
When they arrive, I’m going to clean then with my compressor then install them on my 75 and re-install the stock pipes….and then I’m going to keep my grimy hands off of it!
Maybe this was Gods way of paying me back for replacing the brake shoes on my GF’s daughter’s car yesterday, a nightmare project in itself.

jeff

 

Thats one of the main reasons i am keeping all the stk parts for my rd. Can take it from a terror to an original in less then 2 hours . Very nice jeff