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I really need to inspect my carbs but the thought of disassembling half of the Ninja 250 is putting me off for now. Sounds like a winter project 
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Jul 22, 2019 14:58
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nadmonk posted:I do also see that the float in that bowl will stick, but only all the way in the up position. At the bottom of its movement it seems to move freely and with the same "springiness" as the other floats. Update on the float: It was sticking on a small protuberance on the top of the bowl. It looked like something with the way that one float was either made or had been affected by the pump gas caused it to have different tolerances than the floats in the other bowls. I took a fine file and smoothed a tiny bit of the edge of the float that was making contact. It no longer gets stuck. Definitely a bit of varnish inside, but carb cleaner seems to have taken it right off.
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Jul 22, 2019 15:02
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nadmonk posted:So I got bored this morning and got the carbs off the Suzuki. The overflow tube is cracked and leaking. The PO put shrink tubing (or similar) on it to stem the tide. It may have worked for a bit, but not now.
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Jul 22, 2019 15:45
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Dagen H posted:The overflow tube is cracked and leaking. The PO put shrink tubing (or similar) on it to stem the tide. It may have worked for a bit, but not now. That was kind of my thought. But visually, there are no cracks in the overflow tube. To test if there was a leak at its base, I filled the bowl with gas after brushing away some build up. Not a drop drained.   With how much gas was coming out when attempting to start, it would have had to have been a pretty major leak. Right now I'm thinking the float was stuck in some way. I'll test it out, if it does the same thing, I guess it's time for a rebuild on that one  Edit: Don't worry, I didn't clamp the bowl in the vise, it's just resting on top of the jaws.
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Jul 22, 2019 16:33
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Ok, productive conference call. By that I mean all I had to do was listen to what everyone was saying while I put the bike back together. I was able to get the bike to start, it does require a bit of throttle to keep running. But no gas pouring out of the overflow from the #4 carb and didn't seem too bad for something that probably hasn't been started in a year and a half or more. One more thing down. Now I just need to wire up the turn signals, get a lock to hold the seat shut, readjust the chain tension. Everything else after that should just be cosmetic.
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Jul 22, 2019 19:33
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Found out again what running low on gas feels like (viz., it starts running lovely until I flip from normal to reserve.) The KLR went from ok to sputtering a lot quicker, but I guess it only had one carb to drain.
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Jul 24, 2019 04:53
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It's more fun when it happens at a stoplight. *bike runs fine coming to a stop* *carb runs dry waiting for light to change* *light turns green, bike dies*
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Jul 24, 2019 14:38
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I ran the 125 dry on the motorway last week, that was fun. With a tiny single carb on a bike that has to be at WOT just to do 60, it doesn't really slowly lose power so much as it dies immediately. Fun fact, it ran out of fuel in the exact same place I was when my ninjette died, just past the slip road out of a service station.
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Jul 24, 2019 16:17
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Finished the tire change on the R6 with the new Michelin Power RS and changed the indicator relay for a microprocessor controlled one to go from 90s techno indicators to sane 85 CPM again. Also i'm amazed once more just how pleasant it is to work even on a crammed modern bike like the R6 compared to a modern car. Everything is thought through and made from good materials and just an all around good experience to work on. Combat Theory fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 18:08
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Jesus, yes. The entire time I did the front end rebuild on my ‘78 GL I was sitting there waiting for the other shoe to drop re: maintenance pain and it never came.
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Jul 24, 2019 18:17
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Combat Theory posted:Finished the tire change on the R6 with the new Michelin Power RS and changed the indicator relay for a microprocessor controlled one to go from 90s techno indicators to sane 85 CPM again. Honda, BMW and Triumph are considerably less amusing for various reasons but I'd still much rather do clearances on a vtec vfr800 than pretty much anything on a car. Bikes are still designed to be 'good' the way 90's Japanese cars were, not just disposable white goods with wheels. Part of the reason I loathe KTM so much is they bring bullshit automotive garbage design to bikes, and that makes me afraid other manufacturers might see what they're doing and think it's a good idea also, at which point bikes will be ruined forever.
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Jul 24, 2019 20:08
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Slavvy posted:Part of the reason I loathe KTM so much is they bring bullshit automotive garbage design to bikes, and that makes me afraid other manufacturers might see what they're doing and think it's a good idea also, at which point bikes will be ruined forever. Could you please elaborate on this?
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Jul 24, 2019 20:20
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Some good progress on the '78 GS750. I made the call to hack out the weird 70s-80s running light box someone had hooked up. Both front and rear turn signals are now mounted. I think I killed the turn signal relay by initially wiring the turn signals up incorrectly (I had consulted the incorrect wiring diagram or copied it to my note pad incorrectly). After getting the signals wired correctly, they do come on when they are supposed to, they just don't blink. I have a new relay on the way. The headlight is installed. I got all/most of the oxidation off the pipes and exhaust with aluminum foil and water. There wasn't much to get off, but it worked very well. Cleaned the bike, touched up the plastic and rubber bits with trim restorer. When I'm feeling super motivated I'll attack the engine with some aluminum & mag polish. I did find out why it wouldn't idle without giving it some gas, someone at some point had moved the idle speed screw all the way out. Now I've got it so it idles around 1,500 rpm (which I have seen as the recommended for the GS750). No gas leaking from any of the carbs' overflows. There are some small cuts/tears in the seat, I am patching those with the 3M vinyl repair kit. We'll see how that turns out. Other than that, I think the only thing left is clean and lube the chain and adjust the slack.   
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Jul 24, 2019 21:04
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Sure. Every Japanese bike, plus Ducatis and a few others, are absolutely loaded with institutional knowledge earned over painful decades. The guy designing a cbr500 doesn't need to know that things like an access hole in the stator cover to turn the engine over, a battery under the seat, a brake hose pinned to the swingarm are good ideas. He just does what Honda's best practice tells him to, confident that best practice will result in an excellent vehicle thanks to decades of honing. The weight of history leads him to consider what the bike will look like in a few decades and build accordingly - can't tarnish Honda's legacy! KTM don't really have this kind of institutional knowledge, they're more similar to Tesla because they're trying to replace that hard earned wisdom with a team of super clever people solving problems from first principles. So a KTM designer doesn't look at a Japanese cylinder head and see an excellent compromise between performance, longevity and ease of maintenance. He sees an opportunity to shave a few grams of weight, unlock a few horsepower, save some costs, reduce 'inefficiency'. What the bike looks like in thirty years isn't his problem because there aren't 30yo KTM's running around everywhere. What the bike looks like after the warranty period is irrelevant because it's a product designed to impress for a few years then be replaced. I mean my god, they made a single cylinder with two spark plugs, which are both somehow almost identical but not quite, both are proprietary designs that cost about $30ea, for the sake of absolutely minute gains. Friendly smooth engine character? gently caress that, 5 extra peak hp! Oil you can drain without disassembling the bike? gently caress that, use that space for a bathtub shaped catalytic converter with bold new oil drainage channels pressed into the top. The cbr300, a cheap learner bike, has a side stand safety switch with two wires sending a simple continuity signal. It's the same as any number of bikes, easily bypassed roadside, tried and true. The duke 390, a cheap learner bike, has a side stand safety switch based on a digital hall effect sensor coming into proximity with a magnetic knob on the stand stalk. It communicates with the engine ECU using a digital signal and can't be bypassed because doing so trips the CEL. Should the stand accidentally come down when you're riding, you get a CEL, a fault code, and a bike that won't run until you come to a stop and cycle the key. I could go on and on. Just don't encourage them by buying their stuff and they'll go away. History is littered with terrible Japanese bikes resulting from a desire to do something zany and marketable at the expense of what's known to work. KTM have no idea what works and just do zany poo poo constantly. They cynically target the most marketable attributes of a bike, which is usually the stuff that impresses journalists, at the expense of stuff that makes a bike you'd actually want to own. IMO this is why older KTM's are more rugged dependable than later models. Compare and contrast to triumph, who made poo poo bikes for a decade, despite knowing how to do it right, because of cost constraints. They relentlessly triaged their model range down to a few basic platforms identified as working and selling well, then spent a decade refining the gently caress out of them. Now a modern Triumph is nearly as good as a Japanese bike.
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Jul 24, 2019 21:32
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Slavvy posted:I mean my god, they made a single cylinder with two spark plugs, which are both somehow almost identical but not quite, both are proprietary designs that cost about $30ea, for the sake of absolutely minute gains. 
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Jul 24, 2019 23:15
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Ulf posted:More like "what did you do this week", but: ✅ stainless brake line ✅ adjusted pilot jet for my altitude ✅ iridium plugs ✅ 1600-mile IBA ride I've got a centerstand coming, and I guess I should rejet the rest of the carb, but after that I'm running out of ideas short of something drastic like new rings (probably won't bother). As you can see from the above I'm hitting the point of diminishing returns on fixing things. I guess every project has to be done someday.
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Jul 25, 2019 04:30
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Slavvy posted:Sure. Thanks for taking the time to explain all of that. I love hearing about the design cultures various vehicle manufactures have. A lot of those things I hadn't heard of. How is this related to how cars became, and the general differences of cars now vs the 90s? I know that 90s honda and toyota were epic, and now they are kinda not because they rest on their laurels. You certainly reminded me why I enjoy being back in the warm embrace of Japanese motorcycles. There were definitely many odd or painful design practices on my ktm. Granted, it was a first model year, but the husky I'm thinking of is a 2016, which also seems like a first model year ktm. You gotta hand it to the wizzbang design choices of ktm. It's all bells and whistles and very impressive spec sheet numbers. Nobody has a pinup on their wall of a crf230l. It's the flashy impossibly light and fast bikes, and their little brothers, that stir the pursestrings.
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Jul 25, 2019 04:58
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Coydog posted:Thanks for taking the time to explain all of that. I love hearing about the design cultures various vehicle manufactures have. A lot of those things I hadn't heard of. My car knowledge is pretty out of date but basically Toyota went from thinking that building a fantastic product would get you sales to realising that people just need to think you have a fantastic product to get you sales. So in the early 2000's they started cutting costs and riding on their past rep and the reliability of the cars reduced accordingly; Toyota's pattern was mirrored by the Japanese car industry in general. If you want cool unusual design then get a Ducati. Their designs are informed by a truly epic melding of aesthetic purity with race-bred pragmatism and a rarely-deviated-from formula stretching back to the early 80's. The deeper you dig, the more mind-blowingly perfect (yet hilariously lovely) they become. Only Harley and Honda can claim a more concrete identity IMO. Ducati are IRL what KTM market themselves as; the most ready to race bikes I've ever seen. While conversely KTM are everything people think ducati are: fragile, leaky, prone to bizarre electrical problems. For me the lessons of bike history are that innovation is critical in small doses, perfection can only be approached through relentless refinement and honing, and the integration of parts as a unified whole is super important. Tamburini didn't squat on the bologna factory floor and just poo poo out the 916 out of the blue, all the constituent parts of the bike were already well developed and refined in racing on older models. He just brought them together in a brilliant perfect whole, tweaking things subtly, improving here without sacrificing there. Pretty much every 'great' bike has a similar background. The H2 has a bunch of cool tech but it's applied to a very proven, almost pedestrian, modified zx10 engine and a steel trellis frame not out of place in 1990. Innovation, pragmatism and refinement in the correct ratio. Japanese brands are extremely good at this: they'll release an otherwise mundane bike with one really zany feature or technology. Then six other bikes with other single zany features. A few years of mechanics swearing go by, then suddenly an RC30 emerges, perfectly formed and pure, a bristling ball of advanced yet preposterously rugged technology. Slavvy fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Jul 25, 2019 |
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Jul 25, 2019 06:41
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Counterpoint: their plated dirt bikes are absurdly better than anything else on the market and are generally pretty easy to work on and, based on anecdotal evidence anyway, pretty reliable and long-lived for what they are. E: I would guess, without knowing, that this is because they do have a pretty decent history and experience in that market. For example, they’re awfully good at Dakar.
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Jul 25, 2019 13:38
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their big twins are the best 
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Jul 25, 2019 16:57
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right arm posted:their big twins are the best Yeah but it seems like the owners shoehorn them into every conversation so it kinda balances out.
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Jul 25, 2019 18:03
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Coydog posted:Yeah but it seems like the owners shoehorn them into every conversation so it kinda balances out. 
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Jul 25, 2019 18:10
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I got the chain on the '78 GS750 cleaned up. From what I can tell, there might be some minor surface rust in a couple of spots. It's more than likely due for a replacement, but it doesn't seem too worn. The front and rear sprockets both look to be in good shape, no wear that I could see. I adjusted out rear a bit to adjust chain tension. The slack is where it need to be now (~22mm, it is supposed to be between 20-30mm). While on the stand I started it up and put it in gear, it runs ok, but it seems to have a little "jerk" to it. I'm not sure if it's that the rear axle isn't in alignment (it seems to be fine, according to the alignment marks) or if there is just a sticky link. I'll have to look at that more closely. Either way, the bike will need to go into the shop. While cleaning the chain I noticed a small slash on the sidewall of the rear tire. It's not enough to let any air out, but definitely more than a surface scuff. So new tire time. Also, this was the condition of the clutch cover when I took it off:  That was a fun mess to clean out. I'm not sure that had ever been off the bike.
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Jul 25, 2019 18:29
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nadmonk posted:
Release the shmooo I usually default to kerosene for these nests if I don't have a parts washer around
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Jul 25, 2019 18:34
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Combat Theory posted:Release the shmooo Thankfully I just bought a jug of mineral spirits, that seemed to do the trick.
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Jul 25, 2019 18:43
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I'm about to swap my sprockets and I can't wait to see what awaits me in the dank pit that is the sprocket guard on this bike that the PO didn't maintain at all.
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Jul 25, 2019 18:47
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nadmonk posted:While on the stand I started it up and put it in gear, it runs ok, but it seems to have a little "jerk" to it. I'm not sure if it's that the rear axle isn't in alignment (it seems to be fine, according to the alignment marks) or if there is just a sticky link. Those alignment marks aren't gospel. I've had multiple bikes (90s hondas) where they had to be set slightly different for the tire to be in alignment. It was consistent though after I first set it correctly. One trick for gunk like that is wd-40 / 5-56 or similar. Loosens it up, but it's still a mess to clear out.
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Jul 25, 2019 18:49
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nadmonk posted:
Sprocket cover  And yeah, for something that gunked up, kerosene or other mineral spirits are your best bet. Dissolve it all off with that first, then rinse the part in dish soap and water.
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Jul 25, 2019 19:03
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That's on my list of things to do this weekend too. Started off using a screwdriver to get the bigger chunks off, but I'm hoping to make it pretty clean with the help of some engine degreaser.
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Jul 25, 2019 19:08
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Sagebrush posted:Sprocket cover  Thanks! That makes a lot more sense than "clutch cover".
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Jul 25, 2019 19:52
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I mean it does contain the clutch pushrod, but the clutch itself is on the opposite side of the gearbox and usually has its own cover (engine case).
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Jul 25, 2019 19:56
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builds character posted:Counterpoint: their plated dirt bikes are absurdly better than anything else on the market and are generally pretty easy to work on and, based on anecdotal evidence anyway, pretty reliable and long-lived for what they are. Having been to a few MX/Enduro meets as a spectator, the KTM guys are always the most frantic in the pits because something is forever going wrong. Don't get me wrong, the specs and outright performance are there but they're nowhere near as dependable as a Suzuki or Yamaha imo. They're not easy to work on though 
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Jul 25, 2019 20:25
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Development: okay we need 2 seals at the block for the Kickstarter shaft and the shift actuator shaft. Everyone: makes 2 holes KTM: makes one hole, designs inner seal as part of the transmission shaft that requires gearbox disassembly if your Kickstarter leaks. Also KTM: oil change requires occasional use of exorcism. still gonna keep my LC4 frankenmoto
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Jul 25, 2019 20:47
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nadmonk posted:Thankfully I just bought a jug of mineral spirits, that seemed to do the trick. Household oven degreaser from your local bargain store! You don't need much and it's super cheap because you're not paying the motorcycle brand tax. My current one that's just running out is an orange spray can labelled "goo go" which seems to be trying to rip off both mr muscle and goo gone at the same time, while being a fraction of the price of either at about £2. Crucially it even dissolves that horrifying engine oil/chain lube/road tar paste that builds up behind the sprocket cover, which I find even WD40 struggles with.
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Jul 25, 2019 21:39
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Renaissance Robot posted:Household oven degreaser from your local bargain store! You don't need much and it's super cheap because you're not paying the motorcycle brand tax. Good to know, I'm sure our local dollar store has something equivalent. I do have some of the standard Goo Gone and Goo Gone Xtreme, which is just mostly acetone and toluene and I can't even find it for sale any more. The mineral spirits seem to work pretty well, they just need a bit of manual scrubbing and wiping. Also, it comes in a nice hefty 1/2 gallon jug at the hardware store at less than the cost of a single spray can of branded chain cleaner.
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Jul 26, 2019 13:04
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Not sure if Renaissance Robot gets different formulations of oven cleaner on that side of the pond or what, but the stuff sold in the US will eat right through paint. I would not suggest using it to get rid of chain gunk from under your sprocket cover. Hit it with kerosene or mineral spirits if it's absolutely required, follow up with Simple Green. Once things are cleaned up you can hit the inside of the sprocket cover with some ACF-50 to keep so much poo poo from sticking to it and make it easier to clean in the future.
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Jul 26, 2019 16:09
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INGREDIENTS HYDROCARBONS, C9-12, N-ALKANES, ISOALKANES, CYCLICS, (2-25%) AROMATICS, PROPAN-2-OL, LOW BOILING POINT NAPTHA - UNSPECIFIED - SOLVENT NAPTHA (PETROLEUM), LIGHT AROM. It doesn't eat paint. But yeah, good point to check the formulation before going hog wild. Kerosene definitely works well too, but I can't buy less than a gallon at a time here, and it's more annoying to apply than an aerosol. Renaissance Robot fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Jul 26, 2019 |
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Jul 26, 2019 19:33
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The oven cleaner I'm used to the US is made from lye or something like lye, and highly basic
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Jul 26, 2019 19:46
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The best way to do it, imo, is to buy a gallon or two of kerosene and a big steel bucket, and you just submerge the parts in the kerosene and scrub them off in there, and then when you're done you pour it back into your fuel can with a funnel and a coffee filter to take out all the big chunks. It'll be black and grimy looking, but you can just keep reusing that same kerosene for a really long time for the first stage of heavy degreasing. Then switch to regular dish soap and water for the second stage and everything will be squeaky clean. The only thing on a bike that kerosene doesn't really help with is the tar and varnish in heavily gummed up carburetors. The secret trick there is to soak them in a 1:1 mixture of Pine-Sol and water. The aromatic terpenes in Pine-Sol are chemically similar to the compounds that form gasoline varnish, and if you leave it overnight it will all get soft enough to rub off with a toothbrush.
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Jul 26, 2019 19:56
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Sagebrush posted:The only thing on a bike that kerosene doesn't really help with is the tar and varnish in heavily gummed up carburetors. The secret trick there is to soak them in a 1:1 mixture of Pine-Sol and water. The aromatic terpenes in Pine-Sol are chemically similar to the compounds that form gasoline varnish, and if you leave it overnight it will all get soft enough to rub off with a toothbrush. Plus it makes your exhaust smell like a freshly mopped floor
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Jul 26, 2019 20:56
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