This past weekend I went home for a wedding. It went well.

On Sunday, I spent my time working on the Kawasaki. My goal was to get it started to see what I had to work on. This was difficult seeing as how I didn’t have a battery or a key. I bought a battery. As for the key, my dad and I learned how to hot wire the Kawasaki. It isn’t difficult, which worries me.

But we did get the bike started and it idled well. The problem was that the choke had to be all the way open and I couldn’t give it any gas otherwise it would kill the engine.

My dad and I both thought there was a loss of compression in the engine and it was causing this (this is a very similar case to something that happened with my Mazda a few years back and that was fixed with some duct tape).

I have sent my problems off to a few friends who know more than I do so I can get their diagnosis of the problem. One thinks it might be an issue with the fuel lines. I will have to look into that.

For your enjoyment, I give you the video of the bike running:

If you can figure out what might be the problem, please leave a comment.

As for the key, I picked up one today. I brought the lock into a local key shop to make a key from the key code, but that didn’t work. So they made one to fit and it looks nothing like the one cut according to the code. The key also cost about $15 more than I was originally told it would, but I can imagine they upped the price because of all the work they put into it. I also might have been given a spare key blank (that or I just took one that I wasn’t supposed to take).