Alright! Good news and bad news.
Finished the retorque yesterday. Those wobbly extenders are WAY better than the adapters with the joints in my opinion. Put the motor mount and tank back on. (I didn't use a specific torque value for the motor mount pieces... I just went with "tight"... hopefully that's okay; if not let me know. I saw some values in the manual but, to me at least, it was very vague as to whether it was referring to that piece.) I went with zip ties for the fuel lines; not enough space to use wire properly.
Then I ran it. It was warming up fine. I warmed it up about 80% and then cut it to go get my gear inside to take it out for a test. Pulled it down the sloped side area and started it again to finish warming up. Then it started getting finicky. I would back off the choke (as I normally do) when the revs start hitting 1.5+ and do so until there's no choke (or rather, it is choking and not letting extra gas in) and it's sitting comfortably at 1.2ish RPM. But this time, when I'd back off when it shot up, it would drop really low (1K and wanting less) and try to die. Eventually it did die. Then it wouldn't even stay on long enough--even with full choke which normally it never wants--for me to get it back up the hill/slope. I tried to keep the throttle on and that worked for bit but then if I put it into first, it just cut out. I let it be for a bit and thought about it. Realized my gas tank felt light when I was handling it earlier so gas was on the preeetty low side, so maybe reserve would help at least get it back up the slope (as I cannot put that thing with these high bars up an incline). It worked. I'm not sure if it was just that it needed a minute to calm down to work or what, or if it was because of the reserve.
This morning I went to get some gas, hoping to all that was holy that's all it was. I just put a little less than a gallon in it. Petcock back to "on." Started up on the 3rd try. It was warming up as usual, but then started doing the same thing as yesterday. The second it's warming up and I back off choke (less gas) to lower RPM so it's fully off and I'm riding at 1.2k, it lowers a bit but then wants to start dying. If I give it more choke (more gas), it wants to shoot up way too high again. It didn't try to die per se today, but basically want 1kRPM or 2-3k RPM, yes. I also kept throttle on a bit to stop from dying. This doesn't sound too unlike some of the erratic idle issues I was having at the outset, though that'd happen when I was already warmed up.
Maybe this is just the carb issue rearing it's head or maybe I messed something up in the retorque, but I'm not sure what would do this. Or maybe the battery is finally saying screw you--though it passed the load test etc a few months back. Battery has been on tender the whole time, minus a night or day or so here or there.
All I can think of for now is to increase the idle (I think it's clockwise to richen/increase idle) to see if that helps. That said, if the idle was fine once I fixed the clutch adjustment last time, why would I need to mess with it now... Maybe it's just had it now with the potentially lean set up? Not even sure if that was the issue yet though...
I will say that this bike feels very hot. Maybe these bikes are hotter because they're bigger than my last bike (Yamaha SR400) and older (last was 2015), but certainly feels way hotter than I'm used to, even having my legs near the engine it feels more than warm.
Always something over here!
I really really want to try to get this beast ridable today, let me know what you guys are thinking.