Ticking before I start the bike.

[Foxwood]

You said it speeds up? Oh dear. That's not the fuel pump.

A friend of mine had that on his bike, ignored. Next thing he knew, the bike blew up. The ignition sends a high current pulse of voltage through the full system as a self diagnostic. The ticking you heard is a danger sign.

What isn't publicised (it's pretty rare) is that all fuel sensors have a nasty fault which means they can fail castastrophically. The ticking is the first symptom is the ticking. The fuel pump and fuel sensor are on similar circuits, and the pump runs BACKWARDS for a tad. This can mess up the fuel sensor. If you're riding, and it seems like the fuel indicator is jumping around abnormally, bail out! It means the sensor is about to fail completely, and fall out of the tank, dumping petrol onto the cylinder block, and the airbox. And if the adiabatic atmospheric sensor is faulty - boom.

You have been warned.

My fuel indicator does go abnormally sensitive at times. But I've accounted that for some kind of resistor heating issue, since it only does it occasionally during long rides. I've taken the fuel level sensor out of the tank and had a look at it, but it's a pretty simple and sound piece of engineering. Mine didn't have any mechanical or electrical component failures that I could see. Plus when I changed the original lights of the dashboard to LED lights, the malfunction has become increasingly rarer, warranting me to believe that there really are resistors on the circuit board before the dial, which may heat up and hence change resistance.

How can the sensor fail completely and just fall out? It's a pretty tight squeeze to even get it in. I will however acknowledge that the o-rings on the cover may fail, but that still wouldn't amount to full catastrophe. You'd easily smell the leak, before it got so bad that it would ignite.

And what is an adiabatic atmospheric sensor? Never heard of that.