I don't see a kickstart.
I think the Japanese only fitted kickstarts on their bikes to satisfy die-hard (idiot) British bike fans who didn't believe a bike should come without one
Even Triumph leave them off these days
I see 2 cams and only one bike. However since pretty much every bike from the 80's onward has two cams, there must be SOME reason they do it. Any one care to sum up the advantages of 2 cams over one for me? Being able to have more valves? More reliable? Sounding more sophisticated?
The biggest advantage of two camshafts, as Terry implied, is valve area, using multiple valves (usually 4, but 3 and 5 are both also used) you can get a bigger valve area for a given piston size in comparison with just two, and it's easier to drive multiple valves with a pair of shafts than it is with just one. Bigger valve area equals better air flow, equals more power and flexibility.
There are of course exceptions to the above, the Rolls Royce Merlin and Griffon series aero engines have 4 valves per cylinder, with a single camshaft per cylinder bank, but the rockers are works of art and are a complete bastard to set. And Triumph Cars tried it with their notoriously temperamental 4 cylinder Dolomite Sprint in the '70s, a design that Honda adopted and refined for certain of their V-Tec engines.
PS: Terry, directly driving the valves through buckets introduces a whole new problem for engine designers. A camshaft by it's nature rotates, with direct opening, thanks to the shape of the cam lobe, a very small percentage of that rotation is unavoidably translated into a very slight rocking motion at the bucket, which is in turn transferred down through to the valve itself. This is why engines of this type tend to wear their valve guides out relatively quickly, it is also why manufacturers are returning to rocker arms in their valve trains.
