I normally try and stay away from repairing older bikes mainly due to the fact that once a bike is a few years out of production to get spare parts for them becomes a nightmare. It's the easiest way to turn a two hour job into a two day job if you have to sit on the phone ringing around suppliers trying to source non-existent spare parts. But with this Kawasaki Z1300 it was one I wanted to do. I remember when I was a kid and these first came out. It was back in a time were the bigger, heavier and the more cylinders a bike had showed how much of a man you were and the Z1300 was about as big as they came. With six cylinders and weighing nearly 300kg these really were a big bike. How times have changed. The condition of this 30 year old bike was near perfect. The only problem it had was the owner was killing it with love. Thanks to information on the internet the owner believed that today's blends of unleaded petrol would burn out the engines valves and cause damage so he had concocted a mixture of high octane fuel plus added extra petrol additives which did nothing for the bike and also caused fowling of the plugs. Japanese bikes have been able to run on standard unleaded petrol since the mid 1970's and it's a big misconception they need any special blends. After draining the old fuel from the tank and carburetors I stuck in a tank of standard 91 octane. Hooking the bike up to the fuel/air ratio meter confirmed it was a much happier and the difference in the ride was very noticeable. For a 30 year old bike it rode really nice and yes I admit I took a bit of a longer than usual route for the test ride. I look forward to this one coming back. What a trip down memory lane.