Shed Scrambler!

CMM reader Andy Taylor’s wife gladly handed over her potting shed for the build of ‘her’ Kawasaki Z400-based Street Scrambler!

- ANDY TAYLOR

I bought this Kawasaki Z400 as as top-gap, because I was so despondent having seized up my Yamaha R3.5 Special (see CMM April 2015).

It was supposed to be a quick custom project, but I wasn’t sure on which direction I was taking it. A set of modern Triumph Scrambler exhausts appeared on eBay which I bought and I decided that if I could make them fit, that would confirm the destiny of the build – and so it started!

The engine sounded fine with no knocks or rattles, so after I checked it over I just had to re-set the valve clearances and fit new points and condensers – nothing else needed to be done, which was a right result. A mate of mine polished the engine in part exchange for previous work I had done for him on one of his bikes.

I stripped the bike of all the parts that I wasn’t going to use and started with making the Triumph pipes fit. This took many hours of cutting and welding to get the standard headers to work, but the pipes then covered the kick-start so I had to reduce that by about 50mm. I then cut the silencers in half, removed the catalytic converters, then shortened the silencers by about 75mm. The guards were also reduced in length and to save having them being re-chromed I welded stainless cover strips over the joints. I found some moto-cross style foot-rests in the garage, which I managed to fit to the original hangers with a bit of modification and made a moto-cross style gear-lever. I then bought a pair of old Triumph-style stainless mudguards off good ol’ eBay.