Well, here it is, my first bike. It's an '82 Kawasaki 750 Ltd. It needed a little TLC, but it's on the road in fine shape now.

If you want the whole story, I've been keeping a journal. You can read it here.

If you just want to take a look at some of the early pictures, keep reading. Click on the pictures for close-ups.

The first one here shows the color of the yellow fairly truly, but most of the bike is hidden in the shadows. The second washes out the color, but hides the bike less.
          

Here's the power plant. It's a 750cc, 4 cylinder, with dual overhead cams and four carburators:

It was fairly loud when I first brought it home. The reason for most of the noise is shown here. There's supposed to be a cross-over pipe connecting those two 1-1/8" gaping holes!
      

All of this was thrown in a couple of boxes. It's the replacement engine. When I got it all sorted out, it looked like this:

The clutch, starter and covers are on the left. The main block/trans in in the middle and the valvetrain is on the right.

The clutch is interesting. Unlike a car where there is ample power in the leg to operate a heavily tensioned pressure plate, a motorcycle clutch has to be hand operated. To get the necessary friction, they just stack up a bunch of clutch disks and pressure washers and cap it off with one light-duty pressure plate. It takes much less force to operate the relatively small springs but the ganged clutch plates have an impressive combined grabbing ability.

This is the bottom of the engine/trans:

The oil pan is removed. The crank is horizontal at the bottom of the picture. The central circular screen with the black ring around it at the bottom of the picture is the intake of the oil pump. The brownish thing directly above it is part of the starter clutch. Immediately to the left of the starter clutch is the drive chain that connects the crank to the secondary shaft. The top half of the oil filter resivoir is the circular area at the top of the picture. The clutch cage (where those clutch disks and pressure washers go) is to the right of that, outside the main crankcase.

The valvetrain looks something like this:

Note the oily box in the background. That has all the bolts and washers in it. They are all sorted by size and type in the photo, but they sure weren't an hour or so earlier! BTW: That light colored pile to the right side of the box is garbage that was mixed in with the engine parts. Nice, huh?

Oh, and see those two caps to the left of the head? They are carburator caps. The outter two carbs on the "silver" engine have chrome caps instead of the plain metal ones. I figure these are the ones that were replaced. Better too many parts than too few (like the missing tappet that should be in the lower right corner of this picture).