Month: November 2020

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2020/11/22 – Desperate

Spent way too long messing with the bike. Stripped it way down to swap starters, only to have that make no difference. Also swapped carbs, hoping to solve the low power (just off idle) issues, and if anything that made things worse. Finally tweaked that it could be the starter clutch slipping, and swapped that out (success). And the carb runs well enough if the idle is turned WAY down.

I bought an innovate air/fuel meter, haven’t yet gotten a O2 sensor bung welded into a header, hope to have that monday… but preliminary testing with the sensor wrapped in a rag and using a welding glove to stuff it up the exhaust pipe suggests that both my idle and low power mixtures are quite rich.

It seems that the “richen” the mixture until peak rpm is reached, and don’t go any farther advice is actually pretty close to 14.7. I’ve been going richer from there as it seemed to make the bike tractor better (e.g. harder to stall at idle). Somewhere along the way I raised the needle, that was probably a mistake. I did recently downsize the main jet to 155 which made the last half of the throttle work right, before it just changed the exhaust tone.

Anyhow, got out for a bit of a burn through the Oliphant area. Malahat gate was open for firewood collection! Left shortly after 9, home around 1, did get quite wet, but did not see anything that would qualify as rain.

Oh, right, clutch. Clutch gave me grief on the Heather Mtn trip. I ended up making a bit of a test setup for measuring springs. That worked surprisingly well, but I might still end up needing/using washers … or chasing up some newer springs. There was one or two times today when I wasn’t sure the clutch was holding, but by the same token, I wasn’t babying the bike either.