After several hundred miles of paved and dirt riding, I have noticed absolutely *ZERO* effect after removing the weights! Dremel would have been the way to go from the start...

 

Well, I bought a dremel grinding bit, an ez out (to try and remove the broken tap), a new tap and the correct drill for the tap. I may just grind the welds and remove the plugs to make it easier (and then I can take back 15$ worth of stuff).

 

Dremel will be done in 10 minutes. Anything else you try will take hours, and exhaust your 4-letter vocabulary...

 

I ground off the welds and I'm beating it with a 5/8" bolt. It's not moving. I wonder if that is because there is a tap stuck inside the plug...

 

Ooh, that doesn't sound good. I ground my welds, and then tapped an awl in the hole. It broke the slug loose, and stuck the awl just tight enough to pull the slug out with it stuck on the awl. I did have to clean up the broken welds on the bar a little bit to get the slug to slide out easily.

Sounds like yours somehow swelled up. Are you sure you got the welds all cut? I literally tapped mine with a very small ball-peen hammer. I wanted it to stick on the awl so I gave it a quick rap...

 

I ground the welds off and nothing was happening, so I used my grinder cut off wheel and took 1/8" off the end to make sure the welds were gone. I've since drilled a couple "relief" holes in the plug and still no go. I guess I could take a pipe cutter to it and take another 1/4" off and then I could hopefully pull it out with some vice grips...sheesh...maybe I better just get some new bars...

 

Used a pipe cutter to cut off a chunk, so I could get at the plug with vice grips, to no avail. On the bright side, I tried it on the other side with the pipe cutter and it worked fine. It's probably what I should have done in the first place. I have a set of TUSK t-10 aluminum bars on the way...

 

I used a 5/8 bit, came right out.

 

I'm thinking that the tap that broke off is pushing pressure outward causing the plug to be siezed. ahh well. I should have taken my time. Just one of life's lessons.

 

Kawasaki must have really varied the steel in those plugs if some people have been successful tapping them. Mine were super hard and there was no way I'd have been able to tap them without breaking the tap.