Dreamwalker Motors: Motorcycles of Questionable Pedigree: KZ750

This was my first motorcycle. 1983 Kawasaki KZ750 LTD K1. The only belt drive version of the KZ. I had no idea how cool that was when I got it.

I bought the bike in March of 2011. When I got it, it didn’t run, was all torn up, missing parts and full of dirty filthy crap. But the motor turned, and the bike was solid. I saw the sculpture beneath the marble, so to speak.

I was a college kid with a Honda Civic and no idea what I was doing. 18, 19 I think. I got the bike from a guy named Joe. I was a twerp at the time, and didn't deserve his respect, but he gave it. I still think about that guy.

I picked casually at the bike for the next 6 months while "trying to get it to run", but in reality most of that time was me just sitting with a can of WD40 listening to 60s music and wondering what to do. I got her to fire up sometime in September. Will never forget the first time I heard it run.

I'd had the idea of restoring a vintage motorcycle since being 15 at least, if not sooner. I wasn’t able to do it until I got some money from working a real job, something that was surprisingly hard for me to find at the time and a really large source of frustration.

When I bought the bike in March, I was working at minimum wage, which in those days, was $7.50 an hour. This is how desperate I was; I put an ad out in the local paper that I was looking for a project bike for $500. In hindsight, it seems absolutely crazy to me that that actually worked. I guess I manifested it.

In my daydreams, I had been dead set on a Honda CB350. I liked how they looked and thought I wanted to be a "cafe racer", whatever the hell that was. So I was less than thrilled when an "ugly" KZ750 came my way, but I decided on a whim to check out a random run-down old Kawasaki, and when I saw it in person...well, the rest is history. We are inseparable now.

I put up an ad on Craigslist (oh, the desperation) that basically said “looking to buy old Japanese mid-size bike, $500, pieces of crap welcome.” Obviously is was better worded, but that was the just of it.

Weeks and weeks went by and I called several more guys about a CB350, CL360, an XS650

It was darn impossible to actually find the guy’s frikking house, because I had to drive through a neighborhood and mount a curb onto a gravel road that snaked behind a ditch and went back like 100 yards into a grove of trees. I didn’t know places like that even existed in Anaheim.

I met the guy outside (a massive black guy with a hilarious personality) and he walked around to his driveway, where he had just finished washing the bike down. I was met with this.

I admit, I had a moment of skepticism, but the exact second that I straddled the bike I forgot it all. I practically bought it on the spot.

It was titled with a non-op and no back fees. Compression was good, plugs were decent. rust was totally under control and even the rubber components were pretty solid. Really the bike was more just dirty than anything. She cleaned up nice. Not only that, but the tires had bene put on about a year ago and had something like 50 miles on them. Cool beans.

I slipped the guy an extra $40 to deliver it to my house, about 20 minutes away.

Hobby Lobby. This was the first time riding a bike - any bike - on public streets.

Freshly polished cases. This is more or less how the bike sat for the majority of my time riding it.

Around the beginning of 2013 was when I started taking influence from the Japanese Harley builder crowd (mostly due to JohhnyBGoode’s thread on ChopCult) and my ideas began expanding further. Most obviously, I liked the things those guys were doing with their seats.

I listened to the Beach Boys a lot back then, ripping around town in a topless Honda del Sol on hot Saturday mornings after detention. "Help Me, Rhonda" was a particular favorite, and when trying to come up with a good mid-century name for a retro bike with a lot of personality, it seemed to fit.

Welding stays for the cowbells. This seems ridiculously trivial now, but at the time, this was a big deal. I'd never used a welder before.

All of the above writing is old shit. The KZ750 was my only transportation from the years 2012-2015. Work, school, and pleasure. By the end of that stretch of time, I'd basically run the poor thing into the ground. In 2016, I purchased "Judy" the Rebel 450, which promptly became my new daily rider. I put Rhonda up on blocks with the intention of giving her a makeover. I'm usually pretty diligent about getting things done, but for whatever reason, this turned into my longest project. I took this photo in 2018, which reflected what she looked like for the better part of ten years.

In 2020 I spent a good amount of money on parts, and sourced most of what I needed for the rebuild, but since I wouldn't make it back to California for several years still, the project remained on hold. It wasn't until 2025 that I finally made the first moves (largely permitted by finally finishing my Drifter 800 build), and once things started, they happened fast. All the better, because this bike had been waiting a long time.

Here's a before and after of the top triple clamp. This was a surprisingly big step forward, since this was one of those random things I'd been thinking about doing since I'd removed the original cluster, which was at least ten years prior.

I think it turned out pretty OK. Little victories. I probably would have painted this back in the day, but now I'll leave it. Sportsters have really taught me to love polished aluminum!

Next, shaving and polishing the fork lowers for some Big Chopper Guy action. Pipe sanders make this job incredibly easy. If you don't have a pipe sander, you can forget the whole thing.

Now me and the bike both have shaved legs

Staying on the front end, I cleaned up those old cowbell tabs Brody and I did in 2012 and reprofiled them with a rounded shape. Then I scrubbed and painted the entire lower clamp.

I got this square of stamped louvers and cut out a vanity plate to fit behind the headlight to try to fill some of that dead space. Wasn't sure if I loved this or not.

After deliberating on a few available options, I decided Cycle One Manufacturing was the hardtail I wanted. I spoke to Red on the phone in great detail about what I was looking for, and he provided every custom spec I wanted. My goal was to keep the dimensions to run my original belt, so I took painstaking measurements of my existing swingarm, and he copied them exactly. We corresponded back and forth on the dimensions and desired look, and eventually, a beautiful piece of kit showed up at my door. I have nothing but the best things to say about Red. He was fun to talk to, and the guy really, really cared and was interested in giving me the best product he could, because he knew it was an important part of a really personal project. Many thanks to the guy.

www.cycleonemanufacturing.com

An exciting mail day

Brody helped me get the hardtail on with some real shadetree shit. We made a rig out of 2x4s to line up the frame on and eyeballed the hardtail to kiss it, then used ratchet straps to suck it all together. We actually ended up making a reverse pipe clamp by chopping off an antique one, flipping the fixture around and welding it back together and then welding a nut onto the adjuster so we could crank the hell out of it with a socket wrench. I still have that tool somewhere.

Basically, after lining it up, we had to spread the bottom and pinch the top. It took some doing, but in the end, it went on straight enough. Brody is THE person you want around any time you have to do some Jimmy Neutron shit. He has literally never failed to come up with some batshit creative idea to get something done.

Getting broken down. This is the last time she would ever look like this

Byeeeeee

No going back now!!!

Wish I'd gotten more photos of the process here, but we were pretty occupied. This was shortly before the ratchet straps made an appearance.

I made some stout gussets to try to clean up the lines left over by the OEM frame. These aren't my best welds by today's standards, since I was still learning at this point. Still, I've seen worse.

Reference photo before carding off the factory specs. Look at all this shit!

A couple of snapshots of this project (including the first-ever mockup of the new frame) appeared randomly in Unaffiliated videos:

(12:30 mark)

(23:55 mark)

After enough time spent feeling out my options (and a healthy obsession with the Japanese bobber scene), I started to finally get my vision for Rhonda's final iteration.

This rear fender came from a swap meet for $5 and looked like ass. Good thing I only needed to use the top 10% of it.

I mounted it in a day and then chopped the entire bottom off. The lower mounts are coupling nuts bolted from the underside, lined up where I wanted it on the tire and then welded onto the frame. Simple stuff.

The rear fender stay is...well, take a guess.

Hardest holes I've ever had to drill

Aiming for a cleaner look overall, a few of my old parts had to get culled. I realized that my adjustable clip-ons were no longer to the benefit of my post-18-year-old taste. I do not think those are cool at all anymore.

So, I found a clean, minimal set of angled clip-ons and flipped them upside down to basically perfectly copy that old Brat stance I loved so much on that bike. No more anodized CNC shit on this build...

At some point, I ended up with a set of knee pads from somebody else's bike, which I put on as an experiment. I probably won't use these exact ones, but I do actually love the idea, so I'll try to find some that fit the shape better and probably run them. The shape of this bike under saddle actually lends itself well to the idea.

The old headlight didn't seem to fit as well as it used to, maybe because there was so much less mass on the front of the bike now, but mostly because I think the new mounts stuck out a good bit longer, emphasizing it. I couldn't quite tell if I just needed to get used to it, or if I outright hated it.

To try to play with the empty space, I decided to make this vanity shroud. This was mostly inspired by the success of something similar I had recently done on "Maxine", but in the case of the KZ, I'm not so sure.

A cool idea, but felt like a bit of an afterthought. I wasn't convinced. But I'd have some time to think on it, since work was starting again up North. So once again, I walked away from the long-term project that was Rhonda. But this time, I felt a hell of a lot better about it.

These photos illustrate what the bike looked like when I stepped away from it again in the Spring of 2025.