Hudson’s Rather Random Homepage

Man, talk about a huge pain in the ass. I hate carbs, and I love them at the same time. They can be a huge problem, or they can be a great way to fine tune your bike.

We ripped the machine apart and gutted the carbs off it, the outsides were ungodly messy, caked with grit and grime. I really didn’t hold any hope for what the inside was going to look like. I couldn’t really document the findings due to some technical problems, but we did get the teardown and a follow up on film and stills, so we are using that to throw together some crazy video for your idle amusement.

But back to the carbs. Got my manual, got my on-line references. Had some people (and websites) suggest to me that the whole ‘thin oil’ thing in past chapters was related to the carbs, since the bike had set for so long. I say nay, they say yay. I grip my trusty screw drivers and head in to find out if they or i was right.

I was right. :P The carb’s wern’t /that/ bad. A tad tarnished, a few had small chunks of gas-gunk in them, but otherwise they were doing pretty good inside. None of the valves or jets were wedged open, which SHOOTS DOWN the whole ‘you were leaking fuel into your crank case’ story. So those of you out there shaking your heads can go smoke a fat one, neener neener. It was diesel, anyways. Last time i checked, these bikes don’t run on that. ;)

I didn’t have to go too far in to find out that this thing had entirely stock jets and such, which is a huge load off my mind, I was worried that the jets and carbs were going to be all balanced weird or seriously riced out with crappy aftermarket carb kits or something. I never thought I’d be happy to see those lame stock brass bits before.

Denatured alcohol is my best damn friend, I love the stuff. It’s a great grime killer, it decreases, it cleans, and it evaporates fast enough to not eat rubber seals alive, and it loosens up grime and gas gunk nicely too. And all the shop monkeys scream about carb cleaner. No, carb cleaner is BAD, it eats shit alive. Try something a little less corrosive sometime.. :P

Oh, and you will love this, folks. I found that the number four had its choke catch ‘off’ the bar, which means it was never getting choke, and all the others were always, always getting at least 15% choke, no matter what you set the lever too, isn’t that just PEACHY? Oh yes.

So, I think we got lucky here. Stock carbs, nothing fancy, no off the wall kit settings to be seen. nobody seems to have tampered with the sacred ‘do not touch me!’ plugged screw either. My rings and rubber tips looked good too. So all I had was some clogged jets!

Yes, I know most carb jobs don’t go that well, and you end up having to open a whole can of worms to get them re balanced, but sometimes you just get lucky too. I’m also taking care of them one system at a time, so for one round, its the floats, for another round its the needles, for another round its the jets, and I’m being careful to return them to stock book spec on each.

I found some interesting ways to clean out jets however, one long human hair, syringe, tube, denatured, squirting bin and a sharp eye to spot how straight and perfect your resulting stream is. It’s not an exact science, but you can get damn near to perfect again with a few atempts when it comes to de-funking those jets. thats on the video, too.

If we ever get the thing to look right, the fricking things keep coming out of the editor too dark, and we are trying to lighten them up and encode them in a format that doesn’t blow chunks. It’s thats eating up most of my non-shop time.

I did have a little fuzzy area in checking the float levels on this thing. the non-tube-and-fuel method way. (you bike folks know the one, where you take off the bowls and tip the carbs at such and such an angle and so and so a direction till the tang and the needle barely touch and then you measure between this bar and that float part etc etc.)

Yeah, that whole lot of foolery is a bunch of BS, if you ask me. All the floats seem to be at the same level, but the floats on this thing are pretty oddly shaped, and the way the manual explains it, and the way we measured, and what the ’stock’ readings should be, I’d have to damn near bend those tangs in half to get them where they ’say’ they should be, and I’m not stupid enough to do that. Yet. :P

I’m erring on the side of ‘betting those are stock and untouched too’ instead of fucking with that can of worms just yet. I’m going to buy some fittings and tubes to do the more tried and true method of float level testing, instead. You can never be sure about these things until you see just WTF is going on while its in action.

So the carbs have been given at least one good going over. I throw them back together, put them back on the bike, throw the bike back into shape. and..

End up with a still dead number four and a fucking throttle leak! #$!@#$!

Roll bike back in, strip bike back down, go back, re-check number four, sure enough, the jet wasn’t as clean as i first thought. re-cleaned, etc etc. check my seals. oh, had one a tad loose, fix all that again, throw it all back together again, (airbox tank and all, i don’t have line extensions yet! :P), fire the bitch back up and BAM!

You bet your ass the thing ran nice. Well, nice-er, anyways. Now its much less picky about idling without the choke. It will do it without much of a problem now, but the idle still seems a weeee-bit rough still. I’m erring on the side of fucked up fuel mixture at the moment, remember, I did boost and splash the gas a bit to help the bike clear itself out again, so its probably going to run a little weird until i get some raw untouched fuel in there, and I still need to check the mix of the stuff I’m buying at the local station to see just how much ‘extra’ they are putting in there.

Hopefully they arn’t putting enough ethanol and crap in there to mix up my settings to where i need to balance the thing all weird.

So, thus far I have gone over the carbs about halfway, cleaned and polished them inside and out to rid them of the funk, now I’m down to balancing and tweaking them a bit and otherwise doing the whole song and dance of testing them to see how they feel and preform, which is just a huge time suck and lots of tweaking.

The bike felt good enough to take out for a little roll around the block, at least a careful one. It took about half that to find out the rear brake was only working about half as well as it should. It went from ‘a little grabby’ to ‘Whats that grinding sound? why arn’t i slowing down enough?’ in about ten seconds.

The culprit? Get this, there was a screw lodged in there between the pads. NO idea, looks like road trash. It’s been there a little while, at least long enough to get itself sawed nearly in half length wise. Didn’t do any damage to the disk due to the screw being a softer metal. I found it after i checked my levels and all that, and sort of gave up for the moment to adjust the chain a little. My eyes just happened to glance under the brake assembly at just the right angle to see this..glint. I wiggled a narrow slip of paper up there and gave the brakes a squeeze..then checked the paper. Where are my brake pad marks?..hey, whats this weird t-shaped mark from? :P

A few pokes with a narrow tool later and the thing just fell out on its own. Thats a one in a trillion shot right there, I have never heard of that happening before. Thats like being struck by a bolt of lightning with the winning lotto ticket in your pocket while getting sucked off by a super model, it just doesn’t happen. :P

The clutch cable is just gone, too. I went in to see if I could loosen the thing up..when I noticed the shift/sprocket case was FULL OF SHIT THREE INCHES THICK. Yes, I said /three inches/, no, I’m not kidding, I’m dead serious. I have never seen such a bigger gummed on mess in my life. I don’t know who the hell was lubing up that chain, but they need to take it easy, that was a wee bit excessive on the grease, and the a little heavy on the ‘i think i can off road on this thing’, too.

Denatured alcohol had trouble with this one. Yes, the gunk was just that thick, it would soak up and evaporate the stuff before it had a chance to get it loose. Then I tried WD-40, it helped a little bit, but not much.

Then I broke out the big guns. Lighter fluid, jet-spray bottle, pressure washer, and the big brush of DOOM. THAT got the stuff loose enough for the pressure washer to dislodge it. The thing was a nightmare, imagine a caked in mess that just has ‘empty spots’ where the chain and sprocket moves, and slightly where the clutch mechanisms move when you squeeze the handle it was insane. As the stuff dislodged and fell out of the bike,it was remarked that it looked like the bike had the mad shits, all over the driveway. (all over my new pretty exhaust i did, too, ergh. but I got it clean.. :P)

Got that cleaned up, and..hey, wow, imagine that, the clutch squeeze feels better all of a sudden! :P New problem? the fricking cable is shot, its got that crud up inside of it, and it’s stretched, too. (Gee, imagine somebody trying to ride with that thing wedged like that, and then the guy told me ‘yeah, shift lever is kinda tight…’, jackass.) I had managed to lube the cable enough to make it workable, but it was stll one hell of a squeeze, but now, its almost good enough to ride seriously. Still need to get a new cable tho, this one is one adjustment away from useless, might as well, its just a 11 dollar part. :P

so, along the way I investigate a few other things, wrap up a couple others. Tank bridge was painted, battery box painted, frame was examined a a bit more closely to eyeball a ‘oops’ on the front.

The fork stops, one of them stopped the forks alright, hard enough to put a dink in the frame side that allows the handlebar to smack the tank. Thats a bad thing, esp since I’m about to repaint this thing! Now stop right there, shop monkey, the thing already has new forks. yes, I checked them. Aside from maybe needing a bit of a fluid change, they are just peachy. no bends, no dings, seals feel smooth up and down. peachy. relax. this ‘oops’ seems to be pre-shop for the sale of the bike.

We got plans on how to fix that little problem on the frame, because I sure as hell am not paying 3 grand for a new frame over one little ding in it. This will be covered in another mini chapter of the bike log, since such a thing isn’t very common when it comes to bike work, most shops just tell you ‘time for a new frame!’, but then, most shops want your first born child just to look at your bike, let alone do anything to it.

I’m also planning on doing a few additions to the bike, for example, the following:

1. New fuel lines. Yes, it needs it, yes, I’m going to get something that looks nice.
2. Fuel line quick release nibs and valves, the leak proof kind. why? Quick tank removal and look at the next entry..
3. Extra hose so i can use the nibs and such to stick extensions on them so i can run the bike with the tank sitting on a shelf over to the side!
4. New hose clamps, the real kind. Because these ‘clip on’ kind don’t do the job, at all, and half of them were mangled by some grab ass with a pair of pliers before i even got to them.
5. Probably going to replace air lines too, and maybe some new protective shielding on bits of the wire harness that doesn’t have them, one, it looks nice, and two, the stuff works and its cheap.

Most of that stuff will probably come out of motion pro (, I like some of the stuff they got. I’m snickering at a shop guy (from our little jaunt the other day, remember that?) who mentioned ‘vapor lock’ with motion pro hoses.

‘Vapor lock? huh?’ you say? Okay, time for a little mechanic history 101 then. Vapor lock is what happens when your fuel system has to ’suck’ gas from several feet away. On a very hot day and the right conditions and longer lines, gas would ‘boil’ in the line, or rather, the vacuum conditions would make fumes bubble out of hot gas (basis science there people, fluid + vacuum = faster easier boil). the resulting ‘air’ in the lines would make the fuel system ‘lock’, and stall out or choke the engine off. Only solution then was to wait about half an hour for things to work themselves out and trey to cool things down, too.

Granted, the reason you haven’t heard about this before is because it hasn’t been much of a problem in engines or bikes for ALMOST THIRTY YEARS! :P

Now, if you think about this for a momernt..and know anything about how these bikes work, you are already thinking ‘vapor lock? on that bike? But they pressurize the gas tank and blow the fuel down the lines, not suck it with a pump! And even if they did, the lines lead ‘down’, which would put gravity on their side, and nevermind the lines are so short!’, well, arn’t you a smart little monkey! Thats right, vapor lock can’t happen on this bike, and most others, either.

So you can imagine my face when I heard ‘We don’t carry those lines, we had problems with them vapor locking on us..’ I just kind of arched my eyebrow at the guy and went ‘Oh..uh..huh..really..’ then i started asking the defect-o safety questions. ‘Do you carry joe rocket?’, just to make sure i stayed in a area of expertise they could handle. they went on to hand me their catalogs and nod very quickly, and tried to sell me a 200 dollar JR helmet. :P:P:P:P

You know, I’m starting to make a sport out of mocking the shop monkeys around here. I’m really not that big of an asshole (well, most of the time anyways), but I keep running into the biggest grab asses on the street, I swear. Vaporlock? No carb parts at all? 100+ an hour +100 just to drop the bike off. Rude or clueless customer service?

The scary thing Is, I went into a hog shop to see if they had any of these hoses around, and the old timer there was a DEAD ringer for ‘prime example’ these other grab asses should follow. Old school Harley type, and he even knew the motion pro sport lines and such. They just didn’t have any of the right kind sitting around for me to buy a few feet of at the time. :( I’ll be honest with you, i hate hogs, bug clunky machines, and so loud. i can’t handle the things, my ears don’t like them. but damned if they don’t got some seriously well balanced people working on them. :P

SO, I’m currently stuck waiting ’till somebody pays me some money they owe me so I can run off and buy a bunch of crap.

Already on the way:

1. Clutch cable.
2. Battery pads, (trust me, they are needed)
3. Oil filter (Hey, its an engine thats been through alot, yes, I’m going to change the oil /again/ and the filter this time too.)
4. Battery strap thing (mines missing, no idea why.)

Total cost for that shopping run shipping and all: oh, about 53 bucks.

Where did I get them? Why, i bought them from my new best fucking friend in the world, bikebandit.com, yes, i made that a link, so you fucking click it. It’s a nice website. I wish they could ship a little faster, 3 days plus travel is a little ‘eh’, they could do better probably, but then the prices would probably jack up. :P

THEY - HAVE - EVERYTHING. Yes, everything - Remember that little, tiny washer that you lost and never bothered to put on again? They have that. And only that, you can buy JUST THAT part, right off the schematic, without buying the whole damn engine. For about 10 cents.

They are a little thin on some aftermarket parts for my model/year, but they seem to have a pretty good selection for everything else, and if its STOCK, they got it, period. If you have a bike and are looking to do your own stuff, give them a real strong looking over, you may like what you find.

Still to buy:

1. Fuel and air hoses.
2. Cutoff nibs and valve stuff. (quick release)
3. new clamps and whatnot.
4. Carb synchro, preferably a non-fluid type, I hate those things.
5. More twinkies for shop-bait.

I know I still have some carb work to do yet, but I need these things first, otherwise i’m going to be doing it the hard way forever, lifting the tank is a huge pain in the ass right now, the hoses are juuusst short enough to make it painful to get my hand in there to undo them. I’ll place the orders Tuesday when my extra cash gets here. (flip, don’t make me break your hair. ^_^), we will also probably do our frame welding Tuesday also.

Coming up, but maybe not in this order:

1. Frame welding
2. Clutch cable tweaking.
3. Carbs part 2.(3, 4, 5…… its gonna be like a bad rambo script, I just know it. :P )
4. More and more.

So, when we get the videos and photos cleaned up from this portion, I’ll post them down here at the bottom, like usual, but for now. you get this.

(insert witty comment here):P