Kicking It Old-School
We’ve been riding a Kawasaki Z900RS around for the past few months and now we are finally throwing some much-needed bits at the build.
Photography by Rennie Scaysbrook
The Kawasaki Z900RS is fast becoming one of my favorite bikes of all time. I love everything about it (except the throttle response). The looks stop people in the street, the engine has plenty of grunt and the riding position is about as spot on as you can possibly get for a street bike.
Over the last few months, I’ve been slowly building a parts list of stuff to get for the big Z, and a week ago I finally got enough time to run up to Kawasaki and fit them with my good buddy, Joey Lombardo.
Here’s what we’ve done so far (and we’ve got plans for some more for this bike, so stay tuned):
Dymag Forged CA5 Aluminum Wheels—$2451
Let’s start off with a bang, shall we? The biggest visual and performance mod we made to the Kawasaki is fitting the stunning gold-painted Dymag forged-aluminum wheels.
I’m a huge fan of aftermarket wheels and feel they are seriously underutilized when people start modifying their motorcycles.
These new wheels represent a weight loss of 27 percent on the front and 28 percent on the rear, plus the sprocket and carrier weighs a very tasty 50-percent less than stock.
The addition of the wheels means less unsprung mass for the engine to deal with during acceleration, and for the brakes when stopping. It makes a huge difference to overall performance.
There’re two schools of thought with the wheels: They are first and foremost a performance modification, and we noticed when we fit the carbon-fiber Dymags at Pikes Peak how much havoc they played with our suspension settings. However, that was during the white heat of competition, where you’re searching for every tenth of a second you can find. When fitting the Dymags to our Kawasaki, the benefits are much more about looks than overall performance.
Don’t get me wrong, they are far and away one of the best things you can do when modifying your bike, but we are not pushing this bike as hard as our KTM race bike so the performance benefits are a little less in this regard.
But, hey, they make the bike look absolutely a-w-e-s-o-m-e!
Dunlop Q3+ Tires
Dunlop recently launched the Sportmax Q4, but I tested the Sportmax Q3+ in Texas last year and was very impressed in how they performed on the street.
As such, I wanted to give them a longer run on the Kawasaki, so we’ll be checking back in with you guys in a month or so to let you know how they perform.
When fitting new rubber to wheels you care about, it helps to put tape on the tire-changing machine.If you’d like to check out the Q3+ Dunlops, click this link: Prices start around the $270 mark for the set, depending on your dealer.
Yoshimura Fender Eliminator
The good guys and girls at Yoshimura USA sent us a lovely fender eliminator for $169 to clean up the Z’s back-end, doing away with some high-up weight as well as slimming the rear of the bike down.
This was the trickiest thing to fit during the day, as we reused the standard indicators and needed to cut the wiring to use the number-plate light.
Yoshimura supplies an electrical connector to link up the light and bike wiring, but it’s not great quality and we busted our first connector and thus didn’t use the second one. The easiest and most foolproof way of connecting the four wires is to solder them together and use heat-shrink wrapping to insulate them.
Lining the bracket up to fit can be a pain as well, as you need to have four separate plate pieces in the right spots to get the eliminator screwed to the bike. Once that’s done. However, it’s all a piece of cake and the results speak for themselves.
You can check out the Yoshimura fender eliminator right here.
Akrapovic Muffler
This is the easiest swap of the whole build. Simply take the 10mm bolt and 12mm nut off the mounting bracket, slide the standard muffler off, and do the reverse when fitting the Akrapovic unit.
The $822 Akro is a lightweight titanium unit with a slightly deeper sound, although I wouldn’t say it’s any louder than the standard exhaust and it hasn’t really made the bike any faster (Akrapovic claims a 0.9 horsepower gain at 8200 rpm from the muffler). It might be faster if we could fit the full system that’s also available, but that would mean the Z would no longer be highway-legal. Bummer.
By the way, Akrapovic has this great feature on its website where you can hear the differences between theirs and the stock exhausts on their website. Check it out here.
Bits and Bobs
Click here to read this in the Cycle News Digital Edition Magazine.
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