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« on: 23 October 2022, 01:17:17 pm »
Hey all just an introduction into the FZS600 we’ve bought for my fiancées first bike. Not really asking anything specifically, I’m sure any questions I want to ask are answered elsewhere on the forums. That said if anyone would like to chime in with their knowledge and experience that would be very welcome - doesn’t hurt to have as much info as possible in one place for easy reference. Cheers in advance.
So we’ve bagged a slightly tatty (but dirt cheap) 99 model in Silver, 43,000 miles which handles and stops pretty well. New tyres, braided brake lines and the ‘two on dip beam’ headlight mod already done. Still a good bike in this day and age I think, plus the slightly rough round the edges bodywork on it along with crash bungs makes it not too much of a worry if it suffers a low speed novice drop.
The problem is that it doesn’t seem to have the get up and go that I feel a 90 odd horsepower bike should. I appreciate a few of those horsey’s may have escaped over the last 23 years but even so, I’ve ridden early bandits that have more pep in them and that can’t be right surely??! My own bike is an ever so slightly more powerful ZX-12R so my seat of the pants dyno may be skewed but I don’t think so. But as with all new to me used bikes it got a bit of a service with oil and filter, plugs, air filter and fuel filter. The old plugs showed that servicing wasn’t high on the agenda for the previous owner.
So anyway the issues. it has an erratic idle with an offbeat exhaust note and honestly feels a bit wheezy on acceleration. I figured it was cheap so I can throw a little bit of money at it. So the investigation started…the first thing I found was a pair of downpipes warming up slower than the other two when sprayed with a mist of water. Trimmed back the HT leads and fitted new NGK caps and that was sorted, checked the tps adjustment and balanced the carbs. Still no improvement so starting to wonder about the carbs but in my experience they are best left alone until you’re sure that’s the problem.
My doubts lie with the TPS, it needs adjusting every time I look at it (although this has been before and after carb balancing) and doesn’t seem to settle dead on 5000 rpm when in test mode, sits at around 5200 so I don’t know if this is significant or a fault in the clocks. The resistance reads and increases fine as you open the throttle on the left/middle terminals (black and yellow wire connectors if I recall correctly) however the two outer terminals (blue/yellow??) are reading 8.3 ohms - significantly higher than the specs listed in the Haynes manual? Also running the bike with the TPS disconnected doesn’t make it any worse (in fact other than the rev counter showing it as a fault it makes no difference at all).
So I’m planning to get a new one, a used one on eBay or similar could be no better. Found a post on here about a Hyosung bike using the same sensor (can’t remember who posted it but thank you whoever you are) for far cheaper than Yamaha.
Any opinions here before I pull the trigger? It seems to be common with the TPS on our aging bikes. I’m planning to pull the carbs anyway once winter sets in hard, the camchain tensioner also needs some attention as that sewing machine noise drives me mental!!
Anyway thank you for reading, probably typed far too much but wanted to paint as full a picture as possible. Cheers gang, looking forward to hearing from you and hope my experience with this might help others in the future.
Darren.