End @ 67,651 (106 miles)
After existing in a state of despiar for a week(ish), I finally decided to reach out for help. One person said I needed to take apart the carbs and check the butterflies for correct positioning. Another said I needed to start all over and implied my valve clearance choices were all wrong! Both possibly correct, but both not at all helpful.
I’m not starting over. I prefer my valves a little on the loose side, especially since I’m concerned I may be looking at valve seat recession. I’ll know more when I check them at 70,000 miles.
I’m not disassembling both entire carburetors to see if the butterflies are installed wrong. If they were, there would have been much more of a problem ALL YEAR LONG. Everything was MOSTLY fine before I touched anything and now it’s all fouled up. What I need is someone to tell me which screw to turn to reduce the stinking idle speed – that’s it! Too fast = too much air = some setting that can be changed. What setting is THAT?
On Thursday, I called George. “I’m retired!” he said when he answered the phone. I think he knew what was coming since I’m one of those losers who lives their life out on social media. (I really need to change that.) I told him what the other people suggested – G said yeah, they’re right but not helpful in this instance. He might have been humoring me, but I got the 0.15/0.20 valve settings from watching him do them for 10+ years. We agreed to meet at Morton’s Friday morning, about 1030 or 11 since they had a bunch of bikes scheduled for stuff right at 9 AM.
I rode a bit on I 95 – from Atlee (ish) to north of Ashland and from Thornburg to the exit just south of Morton’s. I wanted to avoid sitting at lights with the idle acting up even though I’d taken to shutting the bike of at lights. I just didn’t want to screw with it. I can do 65 just fine on the freeway without too much vibration, so I did that to make my life easier. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t awesome. I arrived around 10 and George got there a little before 11.
He listened to the bike idle in the parking lot – still warm from my ride but not fully heated up to “operating temperature” any more – and said, “Can you hear that? The carbs aren’t balanced.”
“No, George, I can’t *#^$ing hear that,” I replied. He laughed. I continued, “I don’t even know what ‘that’ is!” He laughed some more.
The tubes between the carbs and the cylinders were fine and I’d snugged the O-clamps that morning. If air were getting in there it would be “bad air,” negatively affecting the fuel-air mixture and causing problems with both idle and running. Air coming in through the tubes between the air box and the carbs would just be unfiltered air, but still on the “front” side of the carbs. That’s not a big deal, because the carbs regulate the amount of air being used, filtered or not.
George popped the carbs off. The back sides – closest to the engine – were filthy, caked with grease and grime. Maybe not such a bad thing, but that’s where the “choke” mechanisms are, which led G to start looking more closely there. He noticed on one side that the choke lever on the carb wasn’t fully seating in its off position when the choke lever on the side of the air box was in its off position. That was one of our prime suspects in The Case of Too Much Air In the Air-Fuel Mix. He fixed that by adjusting the cable with an 8mm wrench after I did some cleaning and degreasing.
One throttle cable’s free play was perfect (left side, I think), about 2 mm. The other side had no free play at all. George fixed that by adjusting the cable with a 10mm wrench. Possibly a suspect in the case, but would really matter more at speed instead of at idle.
The housing the throttle cables are in on the grip (up on the handlebar) was loose – I screwed that down snugly. The throttle cables don’t wiggle up there now. Probably not a suspect in the case, but still needed fixed.
When closing the throttle, the arm the butterfly is on is supposed to stop against a long spring-loaded screw on the outside of the carb. Neither of them was doing that. George fixed that with a flathead screwdriver and some patience, balancing them against the pull of the cable so the screw was stopping the butterflies instead of the throat of the carb body doing it.
We took the bike outside so he could balance the carbs using his approximately 100-year-old balancer box. In about five minutes they went from WAY OFF to quite close to each other at both idle and at 3500 rpm. A test ride showed his minor adjustments had a major effect – the bike ran great and more importantly, the idle was low and steady when the bike wasn’t moving.
I treated George to lunch at Cracker Barrel – he had two pancakes with butter and no syrup, he might be an alien. Dude has a weird diet but is sure great with carbs!
Rode home via US 17/VA 2/US 301 and was pleased with both the bike and the weather. NO HIGH IDLING!!
