Well, i haven't been back at this for a minute, because I wanted to wait until I wasn't just futzing around and had some real tangible results. Today was a very productive day. What i've accomplished since the last post (it's not much):
Built and fitted brackets to re-position the rubber pucks that seat the gas tank.
Adjusted the height of the rear bolt bracket to get the tank into a position that will look level and true once the bike is in its finished stance. I did this by putting a ratchet strap over the triple tree and ratcheting down the front forks incrementally to achieve measurable amounts of "lowering" while placing spacers under the rear wheel to achieve measurable increments of "raising" until the bike sat the way i intend for it to sit. it's not much of a change from the original stance, but it leaves the tank perfect.
I removed the standard petcock from under the bike since it was too tall and was resting on the engine. It was replaced with a janky apparatus of my own design. I placed a brass cap over the nipple coming out of the bottom of the gas tank, drilled a hole right in the center of it, and then threaded that hole. I think screwed in a brass gas line elbow similar to the one shown to me earlier in this thread. from there I ran some gas line right to a tidy little in-line filter that was meant for an ATV. Honestly, i can't believe it worked as well as it did. no problems to report here. not even any leaks.
removed, disassembled, and went through the carbs. This is a big one. The bike was failing to run on anything but choke, running on one cylinder half the time, and running extremely rich, spewing gas-heavy smoke out the back. Once i took the carbs apart i found that some fool had put one of the jet needles in wrong. the thing was sitting all loose-like *inside* the vacuum piston instead of hanging through the bottom of it and seating into the needle jet. near as i can tell they slid it in *on top* of the needle holding doodad rather than underneath it, causing it to just pop right up as soon as sufficient pressure came out of the needle jet. On top of that the pilot jets from both carbs were clogged to hell. a thorough cleaning, de-clogging and reassmebling the jet needle situation. made a world of difference. once i got it back on the bike performed a regular, smooth, standard idle at 1200 rpms for the first time since i've owned it.
What's next? heck. I guess i'll put a temporary finish on that gas tank to make sure it doesn't rust while i continue working.
my next big step is that I have some jets on the way from Jets R Us to fine tune my now-functioning carbs. After that the wheels, chain, sprockets, rear brakes, rear fender, and battery box are all coming apart. The three big notes on my agenda are to clean the wheels up to be presentable, get new tires installed, make sure the rear brake is working as well as it can be, put new chain and sprockets on (gonna change the gearing ratio a bit), and hopefully take the first steps toward installed a compact battery so that I no longer need the battery box. in between all this I will be doing a lot of frame cleaning, de-rusting, and protecting the spots i clean. I've also got a plan to take a very close look at the swingarm to make sure everything is in order there before i carry on re-assembling all this.
