KZ1000 oil cooler photos?
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From: Mike W. on 3 Mar 2007 12:11 <Sorry if this is a repeat post, it does not appear to have posted after a couple of weeks> I'm presently looking for a "practice bike" to use for both drilling and teaching police motor handling skills. I want to put an oil cooler on this, possibly with a thermostatically activated fan. These drills are hard on the engine/clutch and almost all occur at low speeds. I know KZ/KZPs have had oil coolers mounted on them over the years by their owners and am trying to track down some photos to see what the installation details looked like. My preference is the KZP but any KZ will be welcome. APBM is always a good place to post these things, so I'll monitor there and here in case anyone has one. Thanks. Mike -- Mike W. 96 XR400 99 KZ1000P 70 CT70 71 KG 100 (Hodaka-powered)
From: Potage St. Germaine on 3 Mar 2007 13:28 On Mar 3, 9:11?am, Mike W. > I'm presently looking for a "practice bike" to use for both drilling and > teaching police motor handling skills. I want to put an oil cooler on this, > possibly with a thermostatically activated fan. Why don't you just install a large 12 volt electric fan so that it blows directly at the air cooling fins on the engine, if you're worried about overheating? If you're riding around a parking lot slowly, you're not going to get much air flow through a small oil cooler anyway. And, since you are asking about how oil coolers were installed on those older Kawasakis, you probably don't know that they weren't hooked up rationally at all. The aftermarket kits would take oil under pressure off the main oil gallery. There's a plug on the right hand side of the engine that they would remove and install a plumbing fitting to attach the oil line. The oil line would be a neoprene rubber hose or a trick-looking plastic hose covered with braided steel mesh. That hose would go up over the engine to the oil cooler, which had to be mounted ahead of the rider according to AMA rules. Early superbikes that were run on the race track had a small oil cooler mounted on the plastic tail piece, but the AMA outlawed that installation because it could leak and oil the track without the rider ever knowing what was happening. You may still see WERA endurance race bikes with oil coolers ahead of the engine, under the engine, in the fender well ahead of the rear tire, and under the back of the rear fender. I counted about six oil coolers on one GSXR-1100 at Willow Springs once. Back to the bogus oil cooler installation on the KZ1000. Here's where it gets seriously stupid. The return hose from the oil cooler (mounted ahead of the engine) would go up over the engine and empty into THE SAME OIL PRESSURE GALLERY near the oil pressure switch!!!! In other words, there was NO PRESSURE DIFFERENCE between the two hoses to cause oil to flow through the cooler! What caused any flow at all, if both hoses "saw" the same pressure? There was a thermosiphon effect whereby hot oil rose up one hose or the other, and cooler oil descended back down the other hose. Beats me which direction the oil flowed. Maybe the braided steel hose radiated as much heat as the small oil cooler. Oil in the pan would stay around 180 degrees, oil in the main gallery would be about 240 to 300 degrees, depending on the operating conditions. Lockhart made a small oil cooler that looked like a little heater core, Derale made a cooler that looked like an air conditioning or refrigeration condensor with fins on large diameter tubes. Derale coolers didn't do much oil cooling. Racers would go to Earl's Supply for a larger capacity oil cooler. It was thicker than a Lockhart cooler. I suppose you could easily find an oil cooler for a 1986 to 1992 Suzuki GSXR-750 or GSXR-1100. They are really huge oil coolers. How do you plumb the thing onto a KZ1000? You take oil off of the main oil gallery, just like the old Lockhart/Derale/Earl's Supply coolers, run it through the oil cooler, and dump it back into the crankcase at the crankcase breather. That way, you would get oil flow through the cooler. But there's a problem with taking oil off the main oil gallery. You don't want to rob the engine of oil pressure. That's a bad mistake. You need to install a restrictor orifice in one of the fittings. The orifice hole might be about 3/16ths of an inch in diameter, but that's just my guess, you'd want to know about how much oil pressure the engine was losing to the cooler. The early 903cc Z-1 and the first KZ-900's and KZ-1000's had roller bearing crankshafts and they didn't need much oil pressure. But, I seem to recall that Kawasaki switched to plain bearing crankshafts sometime around 1980. You don't want to rob too much oil pressure from plain bearings and cam bearings. The electric cooling fan I mentioned at the beginning would be a lot simpler to install. So what if it used a lot of battery power while maneuvering slowly around a parking lot? It's not like you're going to be stranded somewhere alone if one battery goes dead... Big fans like that are used by hotrodders who take the steel or plastic fan off their car engine and install radiators with attached electrical cooling fans.
From: The Older Gentleman on 3 Mar 2007 13:58 Mike W. <outofthe(a)emailbiz.com> wrote: > <Sorry if this is a repeat post, it does not appear to have posted after a > couple of weeks> > > I'm presently looking for a "practice bike" to use for both drilling and > teaching police motor handling skills. I want to put an oil cooler on this, > possibly with a thermostatically activated fan. These drills are hard on > the engine/clutch and almost all occur at low speeds. I know KZ/KZPs have > had oil coolers mounted on them over the years by their owners and am > trying to track down some photos to see what the installation details > looked like. My preference is the KZP but any KZ will be welcome. APBM is > always a good place to post these things, so I'll monitor there and here in > case anyone has one. Thanks. > <Baffled> Why on earth bother? Just get a modern machine like a water-cooled dirt bike which will also be a damn sight easier to feet-up full-lock U-turns on, as well. Or do you actually *have* to use a 30 year-old dinosaur? -- BMW K1100LT 750SS CB400F CD250 Z650 GAGARPHOF#30 GHPOTHUF#1 BOTAFOT#60 ANORAK#06 YTC#3 BOF#30 WUSS#5 The bells, the bells.....
From: Potage St. Germaine on 4 Mar 2007 14:39 On Mar 4, 5:58�am, Mike Freeman <pi3832SPAMFIL...(a)hotmail.com> wrote: > I have an oil-cooled Bandit, and was surprised to discover that > there are additional oil channels/lines for pumping the cooling oil > around. That Bandit led to a lot of surprises for you, didn't it, Mike? Like the time you tried to torque down the cylinder head cover like an obedient do-it-yourselfer, and snapped off part of a cam bearing cap. Maybe you learned that you never torque oily bolts unless the manual specifies lubrication. And, there's a lot of things you probably don't understand about Suzuki Advanced Cooling System (SACS), or any other oil cooling system, for that matter. Oil lines don't "pump cooling oil around", they are a conduit for oil pressure and flow. The oil pump is driven by gears off the clutch basket gear and the pump actually provides the pressure, not the oil lines. Many motorcycle engines have/had external oil pressure lines going up to lube the camshafts, but SACS flows a lot of oil to the area above the combustion chamber to provide intimate contact between the cooling medium and the cylinder head. Oil does NOT transfer heat very well, it will only absorb HALF the heat that water will absorb. So, why did Suzuki choose oil, instead of water for a cooling medium? The cylinder head and block don't require water passages or a water pump. And, SACS also squirts jets of oil up underneath the piston crowns to cool the pistons. Why would Suzuki built SACS engine for almost a decade and then suddenly switch to water cooling, after all? It was probably because of oil windage losses. What was squirted up underneath the pistons had to come down, and the connecting rod and crankshaft had to fight a rain of oil at high RPM. Suzuki started turning the GSXR-series engine up to 13K RPM, as they were originally intended to operate, before the bean counters refused to authorize I-beam connecting rods that could withstand the stresses. The engine had to find that excess oil windage, so the SACS became history for Suzuki sportbikes. Only Kan O' Tunas, Bandits, and GSX1100G's retained the obsolete SACS. > They don't just pump the lubricating oil through a radiator. Nobody pumps the lubricating oil through a cooler. There would be too much pressure loss. What they do is *bypass* a small fraction of the hot oil through a small orifice. The vast majority of the oil is used for lubrication in non-SACS engines, and Suzuki used a differential pressure regulator to control whether oil meant for the cooler was actually dumped right back into the crankcase. > Therefore, I doubt a retro-fitted oil radiator would do much. Shows what you know, Mike. My GS-1100EZ's oil temperature gauge was inoperative when I took delivery of the new machine. I got to the top of a mountain on my first sport ride and looked at the loose wire dangling near the oil temperature sensor. I connected the wire and turned the ignition key on and was horrified to see the oil temperature gauge rise 3/4's of the way up the scale. There were only a few numbers on the temperature gauge and the oil temperature rose to what I figured was 280 to 290 degrees F. I called up the owner of the $crewzuki $tealer$hip and asked him what to do. He said that $crewzuki should have never installed the oil temperature gauge, that it just frightened new owners with the high readings. He said to go ahead and ride it, but if the gauge pegged all the way out, to put the bike on a truck and haul it to the shop. I knew a lot of speed shop owners and magazine people, so I started asking around about what to do. One semi-professional drag racer recommended the Lockhart competition model with the braided steel hoses. And the Lockhart cooler did work, Mike. It lowered the oil temperature down from about 290 degrees to about 240 degrees. You want your oil temperature to reach at least 212 degrees to boil moisture out of it. If your engine is using petroleum-based oil, you need to cut your oil change interval in half for every 10 degrees over 240 degrees that the engine runs at. During the winter time, the Lockhart oil cooler was too effective, the oil temperature would only reach 180 degrees and the engine wouldn't carburete properly. I covered the oil cooler with duct tape in the winter. Suzuki was using a partial flow system to the oil cooler on their GS-1000S models (the one with the blue and white quarter fairing) and that engine was set up with removable plugs for hooking up an oil cooler. All the subsequent GS-1100's had the same plugs, but Lockhart didn't plumb into Suzuki's system. Instead, they supplied an oil filter cover with an oil bleed notch in it, to allow oil under pressure to bypass the filter and go to the oil cooler.
From: Mike W. on 5 Mar 2007 00:39
On 3 Mar 2007 10:28:57 -0800, "Potage St. Germaine" <flying_booger(a)yahoo.com> wrote: >On Mar 3, 9:11?am, Mike W. > >> I'm presently looking for a "practice bike" to use for both drilling and >> teaching police motor handling skills. I want to put an oil cooler on this, >> possibly with a thermostatically activated fan. > >Why don't you just install a large 12 volt electric fan so that it >blows directly at the air cooling fins on the engine, if you're >worried about overheating? That's an interesting idea... I should see what is possible. > >If you're riding around a parking lot slowly, you're not going to get >much air flow through a small oil cooler anyway. It's pretty low speed stuff and a practice session can last several hours. One drill, which is to ride along the white line at as close to a stand still as possible is a real engine/clutch abuser and that line can be almost 100 yards long. You do breeze outs but I worry about accumulated engine wear during the drills... the breeze outs feel a bit after the fact. My interest was possibly mounting a cooler with a thermostatically operated fan, like you find on trials bikes for the coolant. > >And, since you are asking about how oil coolers were installed on >those older Kawasakis, you probably don't know that they weren't >hooked up >rationally at all. This is one seriously knowledgable reply... many thanks for taking the time. > >The aftermarket kits would take oil under pressure off the main oil >gallery. There's a plug on the right hand side of the engine that they >would remove and >install a plumbing fitting to attach the oil line. > >The oil line would be a neoprene rubber hose or a >trick-looking plastic hose covered with braided steel mesh. > >That hose would go up over the engine to the oil cooler, which had to >be mounted ahead of the rider according to AMA rules. Do you have any ideas as to where they ended up on the police bikes? Police bikes obviously see severe duty and it seems to be a very logical modification. I guess I could mount it inside one of the forward engine guards but I'd SWEAR I saw on in the down tubes a few years ago and didn't pay that close attention. There's a bunch of photos of my bike here if you'd want to refer to one: http://users.crocker.com/~mwilliams/My_P18.htm > >Early superbikes that were run on the race track had a small oil >cooler mounted on the plastic tail piece, but the AMA outlawed that >installation because it could leak and oil the track without the rider >ever knowing what was happening. > >You may still see WERA endurance race bikes with oil coolers ahead of >the engine, under the engine, in the fender well ahead of the rear >tire, and under the back of the rear fender. I counted about six oil >coolers on one GSXR-1100 at Willow Springs once. I hope he got it up to a high enough temp to boil the water out of the oil:) > >Back to the bogus oil cooler installation on the KZ1000. Here's where >it gets seriously stupid. The return hose from the oil cooler (mounted >ahead of the engine) would go up over the engine and empty into THE >SAME OIL PRESSURE GALLERY near the oil pressure switch!!!! I used to teach electrical engineering. I think I saw the electrical equivalent this a few times. > >In other words, there was NO PRESSURE DIFFERENCE between the two hoses >to cause oil to flow through the cooler! > >What caused any flow at all, if both hoses "saw" the same pressure? >There was a thermosiphon effect whereby hot oil rose up one hose or >the other, and cooler oil descended back down the other hose. > >Beats me which direction the oil flowed. Maybe the braided steel hose >radiated as much heat as the small oil cooler. If this works the way the heating loop in my den works when the check valve craps out, the warm oil rises toward the cooler... so in that direction. > >Oil in the pan would stay around 180 degrees, oil in the main gallery >would be about 240 to 300 degrees, depending on the operating >conditions. > >Lockhart made a small oil cooler that looked like a little heater >core, Derale made a cooler that looked like an air conditioning or >refrigeration condensor with fins on large diameter tubes. Derale >coolers didn't do much oil cooling. > >Racers would go to Earl's Supply for a larger capacity oil cooler. It >was thicker than a Lockhart cooler. > >I suppose you could easily find an oil cooler for a 1986 to 1992 >Suzuki GSXR-750 or GSXR-1100. They are really huge oil coolers. > >How do you plumb the thing onto a KZ1000? You take oil off of the main >oil gallery, just like the old Lockhart/Derale/Earl's Supply coolers, >run it through the oil cooler, and dump it back into the crankcase at >the crankcase breather. How was the connection to the crankcase breather made? Did you just fire the oil back into the breather? If so, was there any downside to sealing the breather off? > >That way, you would get oil flow through the cooler. > >But there's a problem with taking oil off the main oil gallery. > >You don't want to rob the engine of oil pressure. That's a bad >mistake. You need to install a restrictor orifice in one of the >fittings. The orifice hole might be about 3/16ths of an inch in >diameter, but that's just my guess, you'd want to know about >how much oil pressure the engine was losing to the cooler. > >The early 903cc Z-1 and the first KZ-900's and KZ-1000's had roller >bearing crankshafts and they didn't need much oil pressure. > >But, I seem to recall that Kawasaki switched to plain bearing >crankshafts sometime around 1980. You don't want to rob too much oil >pressure from plain bearings and cam bearings. > >The electric cooling fan I mentioned at the beginning would be a lot >simpler to install. So what if it used a lot of battery power while >maneuvering slowly around a parking lot? > >It's not like you're going to be stranded somewhere alone if one >battery goes dead... There's actually a device made to power strobes that will cut them out before you eat the whole battery... would be perfect for this. > >Big fans like that are used by hotrodders who take the steel or >plastic fan off their car engine and install radiators with attached >electrical cooling fans. Thanks again... this was a great reply. Mike -- Mike W. 96 XR400 99 KZ1000P 70 CT70 71 KG 100 (Hodaka-powered) |