I posted a
topic a few weeks ago and received some sage advice from you foccers. New fuel and air filters, carbs out and completely overhauled, checked my valve clearences, new plugs and caps, cooling system drained, flushed and re-filled. Got the bike back together, pressed the switch and she fired up again, no more carb overflow and firing on all cylinders.
The last job was to balance the carbs, partly because I have never done it before and partly because of a kind of ticking/ clanging sound at the top of the engine on the left side which gets better as the bike reaches temperature. After reading around a bit it would seem carb balancing could help. I read through pointer2null's post on the subject to prepare myself.
Here is a short vid of my carbs before I adjusted anything:
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[/size]Now this is where the problems started. Rather than buying the carb tune like a sensible person I bought a cheap 4 gauge vaccuum gauge thing off amazon. To reduce needle flutter it has little plastic valves that you screw in and out on the plastic tubes connected to the carbs. The problem is that half a turn on these seems to change the readout quite significantly and I can't be sure I'm getting an accurate reading. I got 3 + 4 carbs balanced, kind of, and then I fiddled around for ages with the centre screw but all it seemed to do was increase the revs with the needles barely moving up or down.
To reduce the revs back to idle I started to also play with the idle screw. Eventually this proved futile as it seems the idle screw had no effect anymore on the revs (could it have come detached or something at the carb end?) while the revs sit at 3000 and I can't get them down anymore. I was spinning and spînning the idle screw and it had no effect. Dejected, with a wife who I had promised this would only take 20 minutes and a toddler crying for his absent father I turned off the ignition, put the cover back on and hung my head in shame as I walked back into the house.
Should have just bought the carbtune.