Alrighty then! I've been working lots of overtime and just haven't had a chance to fix my bikes intake leak. But today that all changed! I took a page out of Petes book and took a mental health day!
The intake leak , I decided was coming from the enrichener cover on the inside of the left carburetor. Completely inaccessible without removing the carbs from the bike. So , off came the gas tank, airboxes and carburetors.
( I'm getting really fast at that btw) and I got the carbs up on the bench to work on them.
I will be removing this enrichener and having a look at the gasket surface.
And here is the culprit, right where I was hearing that intake squeak when I was listening with my peice of vinyl tubing. You can see the two surface bumps right in the gasket surface. They look almost like a grain of sand.
But they are metal and part of the carb body.
The one in the bottom was especially large. I scraped it with my knife and very carefully filed the surface with a very tiny, fine flat file I have and here is the cleaned up surface, ready to go back together.
I then cut a new gasket out for it because I wanted to double up the gasket to fill surface imperfections. I did this same repair on my other carburetor and it worked really well.
But, I then decided, well I have the carbs separated from all the linkages and pulled apart, I might as well take some time and do some other work to them. So I completely broke them down and cleaned them, sprayed carb cleaner through all the orifices and blew everything out with compressed air. Reassembled them and lubricated the linkages and then I changed out the main jets to one size up, 127.5. The bike had been running good, but Daniel Black has the exact same bike as I do and he put in this size main and is happy with them , so I thought I'd give them a try.
By the way, check out my cool little finger ratchet. Remember when I was trying to change my main jets while the carbs were mounted on the bike? I didn't have a screwdriver short enough? I had this in my tool cabinet the whole time and forgot I even had it.
Doh!
I really should take a look around in my cabinets.
I also took the time to carefully measure my float heights.
So the carbs are clean and reassembled and I connected all the linkages and threw the carburetors back on the bike, got the airboxes back on, re installed the gas tank, all the fuel lines and vent hoses re attached and fired her up!
Beautiful!!! No more intake leak, idles super steady. It was shaking a little so I reset the air mix screws and got her balanced and now it's running really nice again. Very happy.
Now I have to make a personal observation.
The very first time I had the carbs off for rebuilding I must've taken about a hundred photos from all angles and in all stages of disassembly , then upon re assembly I studied those photos like the Dead Sea Scrolls. And I spent days working on them. Today start to finish (running bike) was about 5 hours and that included time out for lunch and a run to the auto supply store, and I never had to look at a reference photo. I can't believe how much more comfortable I am working on this bike than when I started.
All in all a very good "Mental Health Day" , I rather like the idea Pete!
Until next time....
Bob