Kawasaki KZ440 shift problem

Thanks in advance for any responses to my naive questions -

Funny (read: crappy) thing happened this weekend: my wife very gently
layed down her KZ440 in a parking lot. I think she grabbed the brake
when it was in gear during a slow u-turn and killed it in the process.
Not sure exactly. Anyway, after that it was tough to shift into
second, and would usually pop back out into neutral after a second or
so. On the way home it got worse, and now it practically won't go
into second at all.

Now two questions: First, what do you think is wrong? Could it be
something simple to fix? Probably not?

Second: I got this bike because it is supposed to be easy to work on.
Can a motivated person (me) with limited mechanical experience and a
manual fix it?

Any help is appreciated.

 

Bent lever or pivot fouling on the casing?

 

I have a feeling that this is what happened. When the bike was layed
down, I think that the gear selector pedal took much of the weight,
and may have bent the shaft. I'm waiting for a Clymer book to come in
the mail, because my Haynes book doesn't make it clear to me what all
I have to remove to get at this stuff.

It does say "if gear selection problems are experienced ... check the
following points having removed the clutch to gain access to the
relevant parts." But they don't say how much engine you have to
remove to take out the clutch.

Hopefully that book gets here soon, and has all the answers

Thanks for the suggestion!

 

Bent *gear* lever.

 

All right, the solution turned out to be the cheapest, easiest, and
dumbest (most dumbestest, for lurking grammar nazis) possible.
Thankfully.

It was just the gear selector pedal that was bent. It was bent
towards the bike, so it was running into the "bump" on the engine
casing, but I didn't figure it out right away because when I was
testing the range of motion of the pedal by hand, it seemed to stop
maybe half a centimeter before it got to the "bump". But I think that
was because the bike was stopped, and so the neutral finder wouldn't
let it go further. I'm not sure, just guessing. Anyway, after
bending it back out where it should go (by hand -- that's some quality
steel there) I was good to go. Phew!

I'm glad I waited long enough for common sense to kick in before I
started tearing up the bike.

Thanks again for all your helpful suggestions.