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To defend myself, only slightly, three years ago before I abandoned the bike in the back of the garage I used a color-tune to set the pilot screws. I had some confusion because I could get a blue color across a wide range of turns on the pilot screws, roughly 2 to 4 turns. I guessed roughly three turns, more or less, and had inconclusive results. Honestly, I don't remember going back and fine tuning the pilot screws afterwards. I lost my notes as to where I set them and in the process of redoing the valves and prepping the bike for use, and trying to sort out multiple issues, the pilot screws were overlooked. Their mal-adjustment came back with a bang when I first took the bike out last week. You cannot troubleshoot a bad ignition system if your carbs foul two cylinders in only 12 miles. Tomorrow I will check to see if the adjustments I made tonight have helped. The reason I put the bike up is that not only did it run poorly but the top end was making weird screechy sounds. Really loud and it sounded like something was really off. When I checked the valves this year, the valves were just like I set them and I was looking at the manual checking the conversion from mm to inches, when I spotted that the exhaust valve clearances in the manual were tighter than the intake valves. Really ? Sound right to you ? I will point out again as I did in another thread, THE VALVE CLEARANCES IN THE '83 YAMAHA FACTORY MANUAL ARE IN FACT REVERSED. Anyway, when you are going through a troubleshooting process you must eliminate variables. Messing with multiple widgets at once just muddies the water. The bike runs like garbage. The only sane thing to do is to go back to the beginning and do the check list from square one. Don't skip steps or jump to conclusions. I would go on about adjusting carbs but there must be 100 threads here about adjusting carbs and it would be totally redundant. In the meanwhile I will discuss my deep wisdom on the subject of bleeding brake systems....

Ahh... it was #4 carb and I noticed when the bike started pulling towards the right... As this is a TECH forum, I thought I might share a special electrical trick I discovered... If you have no room left in your breaker panel in your garage or if you are sad because your air compressor or welder keeps tripping the breaker, here's how to fix it at almost no cost what so ever !!!! TA DA !!!

That sucks, I left at 6:30 and rolled in at 3:30pm. I got very little traffic, however there were lots of cops out on I-40.. I bailed on the interstate and ran up Rt-29.. Much more pleasant of a ride....540miles I guess I didn't do too bad... Ron, After following you during the rides last weekend. I think we need to re-name you Sparky....LMAO

Thanks for the weekend to all. Also thanks for the great riding pictures Mrs. @WIZ... (Tina)

Note to SELF... A properly tightened main jet looks exactly the same as one gently finger tight, that unscrews and falls to the bottom of the float bowl to jam the float.

Based on the OP's description of the repeated symptoms, I'd say it's debris/gunk in the proportioning valve, and/or the brake hose to the rear slave is delaminated and blocking return flow. Definitely time for a flush and new hoses. I have never been very good about maintaining brakes properly. I tend to ignore them until they fail in some manor. Stupid, I know, but it still a fact. I am going to make a concerted effort and set up a schedule to flush the brakes periodically and be more proactive. I thought the brakes on my '83(all original parts) were good until I rebuilt the MCs and installed new hoses, Earl's delink kit. There was a night and day difference in the feel and performance.

Personally I prefer the OEM carb setup. For one thing with four carbs you can balance the engine better which is specially nice if your compression between cylinders vary. With a single carb you cannot, you can only attain a general adjustment across the board. If a carb fails you can still run on the other three to get somewhere other than the side of the road. Finally looking at the setup you would also reduce air volume though I guess air velocity would increase, maybe. There is a reason why in the muscle car hay day we replaced 2 barrel carbs with four barrel or even 6 packs. JMHO.

Just polish it up real nice, stick an HD sticker on it and trailer it around while sitting in an air conditioned truck. 🤣🤣🤣

Thank you so much Marcarl, for your kind words. Because I've always believed that too much of a good thing is almost enough, I have contacted my ham radio buddy to see if he has some insight to this spark issue. While I wait for his input, I thought I might find inspiration from the Government to help me in my time of need: My plan going forward... 1) Appoint a diverse commission to study the black box that must include persons with degrees in Horticulture, Philosophy and Art History. They must also come from different countries and have English as a second language. 2) Get a statement from an economist to prove a motorcycle that does not run is better than one that does because the money not spent on gas and insurance improves the household bottom line. 3) Wire together several dead black boxes to increase the amount of sparks I'm not getting. 4) Re-register the motorcycle as " operationally impaired " so I can get a handicap sticker and a rebate on the registration. 5) Go on a diet to see if the bike will become faster when I loose weight. 6) Get my neighbors to push the bike up a hill, then coast down the hill in front of reporters to prove that it's all better now that I fixed it. 7) Go on a visit to foreign countries ( with Tiki Bars and wide beaches ) to study other people with tiny tiny bikinis and their broken motorcycles. 😎 Modify motorcycle performance standards so motorcycles that do not run are as cool as ones that do.

Well.... I pushed hard tonight, installed the replacement capacitor and the NPN coil transistors, and did a function test. The good news / bad news. The good news is that I didn't kill the black box. It still functions. The bad news is that the spark, though better, didn't improve as much as I hoped it would. Qualitatively, the spark has gone from 10% of what I wanted to see, to about 25% of what I wanted to see. It clearly is better though the " arc welder " spark I saw seems to be an anomaly. I see a hot spark from time to time, but not consistently. I really wanted to report an awesome victory to impress the one or two people who will see this post, you know, get a ticker tape parade and the key to the city, a statue and so forth. Alas it is not to be ! I have really run out of ideas / options at this point. Far be it from me, not to take this last opportunity to continue beating the subject to death. I do want to warn people who would like to replace bad capacitors, that most of the capacitors on the board are polar. They have a + and a - wire. The board is marked with a + for the + wire. The negative wire will be marked on the body of the capacitor. Just an FYI. My statue will forever rest off in the boonies, far from the Venture Hall of Heros !

I highly recommend it. I’ve been so busy since retirement I don’t know how I had time for two jobs all those years.