Ten days with a 1975 Kawasaki S3 Mach II
(Page 4 of 7)
January/February 2008
Staff
Handling is neutral, and the bike feels stable and calm, even in the mild crosswinds we experienced. It’s no canyon carver, but throw it into a corner and it responds with good feedback and no scary twitches. We thought the front suspension a little harsh, and the rear is definitely on the hard side. Curiously, we noted that the rear springs were wound tight even with no weight on the bike, a fact noted by testers back in the day. That means the springs are bound up before they’ve even started doing their job, severely limiting their capacity.
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On the road the S3 seemed happiest at 65-70mph, but quick blasts up to 85mph were no problem, as long as we wound the engine up a bit in fourth and then shifted into fifth. The back drum brake on our bike felt wooden, but the front disc gave excellent bite and was more than up to the job of hauling the S3 down from speed. The bike’s low, sub-350lb weight helps, of course.
On the mend
The more we rode the S3, the more we became convinced something wasn’t right. While the engine has a reputation for being peaky, the performance of ours was getting ridiculous; unless you kept the revs over 6,000rpm, it was almost unrideable. Part of the Classic Experience is working through some routine maintenance, and we used that time to good effect here. In addition to normal stuff like checking the air filter (an easy, five-minute job), the spark plugs (ditto), oil injection pump setting (another five minutes) and adjusting the drive chain, we took a close look at the carbs and ignition timing.
We found that the no. 1 and no. 3 carbs were loose on their mounts, creating an air leak. We removed all three (a gratifyingly easy job, taking all of 15 minutes), inspected their floats, ensured the slide needles were all on the same setting and then snugged them back in place. After re-synching them and setting the base idle and fuel/air mixture, the bike ran much better, starting on the first kick and taking only a minute or so to warm to idle.
It still bogged heavily, however, so we turned our attention to the ignition points, and there we found our biggest problem: The gap on all three – yes, three – sets of points had slipped from a prescribed setting of 0.014in to as little as 0.003in, throwing the bike’s ignition timing completely off-kilter. After cleaning the points and setting them to spec, the transformation of our S3 was nothing short of amazing.
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