Faults:

Battery normal wear.

General Comments:

I love it; easy to ride and very fast; it blows away my Harley Davidson riding friends; they are amazed on how fast this 750 Vulcan is. You just can't beat the reliability of Japanese bikes - bullet proof.

Faults:

1. Headlight went out, but found it to be a wiring problem.

2. Stator went bad.

3. Fork seals leaking.

4. Neutral light quit working (sensor).

General Comments:

Many motorcycle owners consider a 750cc bike to be an "introductory" motorcycle . My first bike was a 750cc. I've owned many different size street bikes and found the 750cc to be my favorite.

I recently purchased a 2001 Vulcan 750. I love it! Aside from being over 15 years old, this is a great bike. I've had some problems with this bike, electric, stator, sensors, but I still love this bike. Stable, plenty of power, shaft drive, corners well, great gas mileage, comfort, and above all, it fits me like glove (5'7", 125lb). This may be the best bike I've ever owned.

Faults:

Well, when I first got it, it wouldn't crank when hot. Had to buy another starter and an AGM battery to cure this.

Seat was wore out, recovered it.

I found my charging system was weak, bought a new voltage regulator / rectifier for it. I found bad connections between the stator and regulator too.

Carbs needed a good cleaning out. Someone used this 10% ethanol gas in it and fouled the carbs up. Use straight premium gas in these bikes to be trouble free.

Had to replace the petcock too.

General Comments:

Now that work has been performed on this machine, it is a reliable and fun bike to ride.

If the bike was properly taken care of, we would not have these problems with it.

The right gasoline makes all the difference in the world with these old bikes.

It gets good gas mileage too.

Faults:

Pick-up coil wires brittle (from age) and broke off. You have to lift the engine to do a full replacement of the wires, so I spliced them on.

Hard to start; went through two batteries in a year and a half. Now on the third battery, and I put a battery minder on and leave it plugged in at home, and have not had a single issue since.

Had a problem with it stalling in motion. It turned out the previous owner cut the airbox and covered it with a sock (in what I guess was an attempt at an ear shave), and the thing was getting force fed at speed or in wind, and that would cause it to snuff out... and then due to the above battery problem, it would usually leave me stranded.

General Comments:

Since I figured out some issues, the bike has been a lot of fun. Great handling and a lot of guts to it. I beat everyone off the mark every time. Fairly easy to work on unless you need to do stator work; then you have to pull the motor. Not ideal, but it's supposed to have had a new stator put in when I got it, so hopefully that won't be an issue for me.

It is not a heavy cruiser, so I got knocked around a bit in windy conditions until I got used to that.

These bike are known to have some issues, but once you get a hold of things, it is seriously a fun bike. Even if I got a bigger cruiser, I think I would hold onto this one just for the fun of it.

Faults:

This bike developed a coolant leak at the base of the forward cylinder at about 3000 miles, due to gasket failure from the factory. Also the drive shaft splines were not lubed at the factory. I learned about the lube problem, and corrected it before any damage resulted from that. The gasket required removal of the engine to correct. The gasket, and those that needed to be replaced to get to it, cost about $50.00. The labor to replace the gasket would have been $1,000.00. Fortunately I was able to do the work at home during the winter.

Later on the bike left me stranded several times, because it would not restart when shut off. The battery was not recharging. Stator voltages seemed OK. It turned out to be bad connections between the stator wiring and the voltage regulator wiring. The voltage regulator was replaced twice.

After all the bugs were worked out, the bike has never failed me since. After 20 years of manufacture, Kawasaki never strove to make improvements on the initial design, even though there were many known recurrent problems. Shame on them.

General Comments:

I like to commute on this bike. It has nimble handling in town and good visibility. Long distance riding is not as appealing. The seat will hurt you, and it lacks the heft to take the buffeting on the interstate.

There is a nice array of features and gauges, and normal maintenance is easy to do at home.