Z1300 Deep Sump Pan Comparison

Z1300 Deep Sump Oil Pan Comparison

Last Update 8/22/08

The reason an oil pan change to a deep sump pan is important on the older 1979 an 1980 year bikes is because of oil starvation problems.  These bikes will accelerate so fast and continuously so, that on hard acceleration the oil will accumulate towards the rear of the pan to such an extent that this engine can experience oil starvation problems.  Since many of the people that bought these bikes did actually run them hard like this, apparently Kawasaki had enough engine failures to motivate them to find a solution.  Their solution was the deep sump oil pan you see below.  Prices vary but the pan is worth whatever you paid for it if you ever run your engine hard.  If you just putt around on your 1300, then maybe you could live without it.

   This is a stock Kawasaki 1979 or 1980 KZ1300 oil pan with a small oil sump.  You can easily distinguish a small sump pan versus the large sump pan in the next image as the small sump has the oil drain plug pointed forward towards the front of the bike and the large sump drain plug points straight down.

   The large sump pan in this image came on probably most if not all 80' B2 Touring models originally, and all 81', 82' and 83' KZ1300's.  I'm sure all 84' and up ZG1300's will have a deep sump pan also.  If you buy one of these pans to upgrade your bike be sure to get the oil pickup tube with it because it's about .75" longer and you'll need to change it along with the pan.

   This image is a ZN1300 Voyager oil pan.  All ZN1300 Voyagers came with a deep sump pan but as you can see, it is shaped differently than the KZ pans.  While it will physically bolt to a KZ1300 engine, depending on what exhaust you're using you may have interference problems.  It will definitely prevent you from using the stock exhaust.

Keep in mind that any year 1300 could have any one of these 3 pans on it if the previous owner changed out the oil pans.  I've seen 81' and 82' KZ1300's with an older 79' / 80' pan installed.  What happens here I bet is that they go to sell their bike one day and they have a buddy with an older 1300 that has the small sump pan.  The buddy offers them good money to swap oil pans, so the 82' ends up getting sold with a small pan instead of what it originally came with.  Oh, we don't know anybody that would do something like that, right!  Yeah, well when you go to buy a bike that should have a deep sump oil pan on it, send them to this page and make them confirm that the bike you're buying from them does in fact have a deep sump pan on it like it's supposed to.

NOTE: On these newer browsers I've noticed that they don't always display my large images in full size when you open an image from the thumbnails.  Once you click the thumbnail and open the larger image, if you 'mouse over' the image you should see a " + " symbol or some other indicator like a box with arrows usually on the bottom right edge of the image.  If you click on the indicator, then the image will expand to it's full size which displays full screen on computers that use a 800 x 600 resolution setting for the monitor.  If you click the indicator again it will go back to the smaller image. Some people use a resolution setting of 1024 x 768 or higher on their monitors and for those users the images will appear smaller than full screen in size.  You can change your monitor settings easily enough if you desire.  Also, the indicator I've noticed is slow to appear even after the image appears to of completely loaded.  The indicator in Netscape seems to be a lot faster to display than the one in Internet Explorer.

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