"West Michigan" could be St. Joseph, Grand Rapids, or Traverse City.
"Western Michigan" to me is WMU and that's Kalamazoo.
OK, are you closer to Gary IN, the Furniture City and home of the 38th POTUS, or to the Cherry Capital?
By the time the Kawasaki 750 two-stroke was released, the company had done some homework to tame the suspect handling of the 500 Mach III triple. That one (500 Mach III) had a great engine, but the rearward weight bias coupled with the peaky two-stroke powerband they gave it made it a wheelie-prone ride that saw many bikes being crashed within the first days of ownership. Apocryphal tales abound of wrecking yards and dealerships being cluttered with totalled Mach III's having double-digit or even single-digit odometer numbers displayed.
The typical Mach IV 750 rider was either moving-up to the bigger bike because they had already owned a Mach III 'widowmaker,' and had come to-grips with the peaky powerband, and wanted 'the biggest one,' or the type of person who has to-have 'the fastest,' like an of-the-time 427 Corvette.
I started riding when the biggest Honda was a then-new 'hairspring valvetrain' whopping 450 cc, and could have doubled as a paint-shaker machine at the local hardware store (short story, below), and Kawasaki's big performance number was a rotary-valve two stroke 350 cc twin, while their biggest-displacement was a four-stroke parallel-twin, a copy of a certain British bike of the same configuration (the BSA A7).
Back in the 1970's, when I was working as a firefighter/paramedic, and attending the local community college (work offered free tuition, books were tax-deductible, and the campus was loaded with co-eds, wouldn't you attend?), my fellow co-worker and I used to ride our motorcycles to class. He had a CB450, I had a Kawasaki Mach III 500 3-cyl two-cycle, notorious for wheelies, smoke, and suspect handling. Of course my bike was much-faster than his CB450 in any acceleration contest.
One day, we decided to switch bikes on the trip to the college. It wasn't very far from his house to campus, probably 5 miles. After we arrived, as we were walking across-campus, I asked him, "when was the last time you checked your motor mounts? I think you've got some loose bolts or a cracked mounting gusset."
He replied, "no, that's just how-much it shakes."
I was used to my two-stroke's high-frequency, low-amplitude buzzing, instead of his bike's low-frequency, high amplitude shaking.
Motorcycle gearheads who aren't sporting Sportster tattoos or a bar and shield logo, and who are-of Social Security age will fondly recall tales of the two-stroke triples, and the fortunate ones who owned one (and lived to tell of-it) will have plenty of first-hand accounts of their times in the saddle.
Here's everyone's favorite motorcycle technical writer, Kevin Cameron, waxing-nostalgic about the Mach IV:
https://www.cycleworld.com/tags/kawasaki-h2-mach-iv-750
unk:......Tom.
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