Vickersguy

Scrap the brake lines. The Mk I has weak brakes anyway and switching over to braided stainless lines will firm up the system. 40 year old brake lines are not to be trusted.

I have no wish to hijack this thread from new member Brook. I do have some observations and some questions which closely parallel his inquiry. Replacing the old caps, plugs and wires is clearly necessary for any older bike. The second step is to accept the fact that all the connections in the ignition system should be checked and cleaned, at the TCI, coils, and the grounds for the system. My question is to the persistence of the "week spark" condition. My observation is that the original spark plug, the NGK DPR8EA-9, has a built in 4800 ohm resistance, the original plug caps had a 9500 ohm resistance, total 14500. This is the OEM design. New NGK caps are 4800 ohms. So now the ohm total is only 9600 ohms. My spark has improved greatly now this maintenance has been done, from almost non existent to pathetically weak, wispy, and thin. My coils look intact, have a 3.3 ohm primary and the secondary windings are in spec. All contacts and connectors are squeaky clean, grounds are 100%. I do have a 2.5 to 3.3 ohm gremlin in the kill switch which is my next target but what about the ohms in the cap and plug. Cow Puc says he's run 5000 ohm caps for years so this is probably;y not an issue, but it might be. Just fishing on my part to unwind this weak spark condition. My suspicion is a low voltage condition, or a failure to completely ground the primary when the spark is triggered, resulting in an only partial collapse of the primary field. Input appreciated....

That Harley front fender won't be much good, but it would be awesome for trading for what you need. Nice score.

We did ok in Oriental, little damage, small flooding.

Well, if it takes the western track, the eye should be about 27 miles from my house in Oriental. So far, so good tonight but it's still early. It's been quiet so far with gusts around 35 mph.

Finally found Freebird's A/C voltage check for the regulator output. I will check this in the A.M. Voltages never go higher than 13.8 volts regardless of the rpm. It even drops to 13.2 volts at 3500rpm from the high of 13.8 at 2000 rpm.

I've had a battery drain for some time. If left for a week, the battery need to be charged to turn over the bike. Also, the battery does not seem to be charging. The search method was to disconnect stuff till the voltage between the battery ground wire ( disconnected from the battery ) and the negative terminal on the battery, was zero, with the key in the off position. Before I disconnected any circuit, the voltage between the ground wire and the negative terminal was around 6.8 volts DC. First thing I unplugged was the battery probe on the wet cell battery. That drove the voltage at my digital meter to 12 volts. Put it back in, it went to 6.8 volts again. Popped the fuses in the fuse box ( original ) and there was no change. It stayed at 6.8 volts. Then, I checked the stator and all resistances were good and no shorts to ground on the three stator wires. Then I unplugged the voltage regulator and the voltage dropped to zero. I've had intermittent battery warnings on the LCD monitor and the voltage on the voltmeter in the interment pod has never gone anywhere near 14 volts, at best I've seen 12.5 on that display. I ohm-ed checked the regulator and it seems OK but I didn't fine a good thread on properly ohm-ing the regulator out. I suspect I've got a bad regulator as the stator has the cooling ring and it seems electrically sound. I did not check the body of the regulator housing to the pins on the regulator plug. Perhaps there is a short there. I'd appreciate any thoughts or direction anyone might have. Even though a used regulator is only $16 from pinwall, I'd rather not have another spare part I don't need and digging out the regulator is not a job I really want to do unless necessary. Tomorrow I will fire it up and see what the voltage is across the battery terminals while running at 2000 rpm. It might be fine at 14 volts or close but if it is, it still doesn't address the battery drain.

Mental illness is just what it is. Mental illness. If you refuse to recognize that it exists, this tragic event is the result. This country has turned it's back on this issue for a very long time. It's not the Law. It's not the guns. It's the road blocks that prevent us from dealing with the reality that some folks just aren't right. No federal or state law can replace responsible adults that could have intervened in this young man's life arc. I'll light up this comment later. I have to get to bed.

( WARNING, NOT AN EXPERT ON THIS ) There are some folks who know better than I do, but I've been poking around with the same question. I think, if you use the drive shaft you have, it should fit into the yoke of a 1300 engine. The swing arms are not the same length. While the engine will fit, the electrical system is different. This is not a bad thing. The electrical components of the '83 are unique and expensive. You would need the carbs, the "black box" ignition module , probably the coils too, and some other assorted bits. The pic-ups on the 1300 engine require the newer box. Perhaps the Instrument pod with the speedo and tac would be required. It can be done but a project that should be done where you are in the rebuild process, rather than one to do later. As for wanting to ride this summer. It's a good goal. I've managed to do this after a fashion, but there are always little things that pop up after you have a few miles on that will require additional attention and you will be down for a bit. I've had the fairing off twice since I've "finished", had the cabs off once, and this coming winter, will tear out the whole fork system for a rebuild. Right now, with 60 miles since I got "done", I have a problem with the right front cylinder ignition that I've got to sort out. That means the fairing, battery box, air box etc. again. For the third time. Any shortcuts you take will come back at you. I know you have the skill set for this and skipping the second gear fix is a personal choice. I would fix the gear because I like second gear. Not having second gear compromises the overall quality of the bike and affects drivability. If you want a great restoration and have an original machine with all the quality it should have, there is no other option. The great plastic which makes a restoration look so good, is makeup on a pig if the machine underneath is cobbled together. I've seen your work and I think the more you compromise the less satisfied you will be with the end result. After all. look at the frame you've just done. You didn't just weld in a couple pieces of strap irn and hit it with rustolium, did you ? The job you did was awesome and I'll do the same when the time comes. I think I better have some breakfast. Later !

I'm always late to the party. Happy B-Day Puc.

Ah, you must have gotten the blue one. The carbs look lots harder than they really are. The key to getting them apart and back together is just having an organized approach. Number or mark the carbs or do them one at a time. Take tons of pics on your cell phone when you take them apart, to help with the re-assembly. Remember to replace everything, so you don't have to go back again. The only thing I don't like about doing the carbs is getting the crankcase breather tube back on the air cleaner box.

I stole the first half from Alfred Tennyson, a favorite poet of mine, whose words lift my heart . The second half is also from my heart and I wrote it myself... Use it all freely. I support you in every way I can. I will think of your families in the coming weeks. They are fortunate to have your steady hand and great heart at the helm in this difficult time.

We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Though time will lead us all to ruin, It will never win. Through our love for one another and out faith in Jesus Christ we shall live forever. May God bless you and your family, my friend. Know you and yours are in our hearts this day.

That's a generous offer for sure. Made2care is about 8 hours drive from you. He would be wise to take you up on your offer but it might be a bit before he could come get it.

I'm sure I have the wrong oil, Castrol GTX 20W-50. I just put it in for a short while, kind of a flush for two weeks of use, to clean out the debris. It really is awful in the trany. The bike shifts notchy and hard. I have some Rotella T-4 to try, with the MA rating, but it's 15W-40. I live in the boonies and will have to order some Castrol 20W-50 Activa motorcycle oil through Walmart. There is nothing available here in under a 55 mile round trip for motorcycle oil. There is no question the springs could be replaced. I really like the feel of the clutch engagement but I could get used to the "end of throw" situation if it comes to that. Right now, other than the oil change, I'm going to have to leave things as they are. The resources for chasing motorcycle mechanical issues have totally dried up. I have a great long list of stuff I'd like to do to this Concrete Blond, but they will have to wait. The only thing I'll pull the trigger on right now, if I see one, is an original, Gold uncracked left fairing lower that has great original paint. I hope to find a really nice left muffler. Mine has a 2 inch long rust bubble under the chrome that is on a weld seam. I've left it alone as I'm sure poking a screwdriver in it, it would be an instant hole. I have the stator wire oil leak. Both handlebar mounted master cylinders should be rebuilt. They work for now but need cleaning. The clutch slave cylinder is also on the rebuild/replace list. I need to bleed the rear/front brake again. The brake works but the throw on the pedal is huge. She's ready for local riding as is, with an oil change next week.

That was it, now there's all kinds of power. Now the clutch seems to be slipping.

Another piece of deep hard won wisdom, never ever ever EVER forget to change out your old plugs when you do the valve adjustment, or you will suffer with the damned doing it with all that junk in the way....

Warning : Long philosophical post replete with unsubstantiated opinions ahead. Values and attitudes expressed have no official support and have not been sanctioned by management or anyone, actually. Read at your own risk. A small amount of caffeine recommended for those with ADD prior to reading. Cowpuc and Steve G are right on the point. This is a mature forum on many levels. A mature forum is a resource for parts, repair techniques, as well as instruction and support for the newbies. It is mature, in that most of the information about the motorcycles embraced here has been covered, in terms of maintenance and so forth. I find it unlikely we will discover something new about the Ventures that was completely unknown before. Granted, new technologies can be applied, like fuel injection but the core of the vehicle will remain. It is also "mature" in that the average experience of the members here are many years deep and with many members, decades deep. There are more than a few members who remember the Hell's Angles on the cover of Life magazine in 1965, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and such, when both were brand new. Yet our experience, as real and important as it is to us, is as relevant for the young today as Glenn Miller was to us. I've never had a young person rush up to me and ask what it was like back in the days when Hunter Thompson wrote his "Hell's Angels" book or even Robert Persig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Young people often can't be bothered to even read anything longer than a dozen words. In this way, also, this forum is in a mature format. Older folks like us read and write as a life skill and a habit. Young folks do videos. Cowpuc is wiser that he looks, LOL. "To everything there is a season", comes to mind when I look around here. I enjoy the support, I relate to the stories. I don't know Cowpuc, but he is a brother in a real way. We have a shared life experience, that moment to moment might have been very different but has brought us to the same place. ( I know we could share stories around a camp fire till the sun came up ). But I'm aware that all we've done and all that we've known, is passing into history. It is difficult to accept but impossible to deny or stop. This is where the "Newbies" come in. About the most important thing we can do here is to support the younger folks in their journey. There are fewer new bikies than I would have believed twenty years ago. Computer screens and a risk adverse perspective have isolated many of the young folks into a sterile sort of life. It is sterile too. The young aren't having enough babies to even replace themselves. I'm digressing here. The point I wanted to make, is that the most important thing we can do is to mentor young folks. Share out bike experience. Open their eyes a best we can. It's NOT enough to come HERE and help young folks that show up. They're already here ! Made2care will be fine. We all are supporting him and love to do it. He has the critical skill set and a good attitude. He has the drive, focus and resources. Mentoring young folks "out there" who can't even imagine the freedom and wonder of what the motorcycle world has to offer is the real challenge. I remember kids in the White Mountains of New Hampshire sitting in the car playing games on their cell phones and have to shake my head. If their parents had taken them by motorcycle, that couldn't have happened. If their parents had infused biker values in them, it also might have prevented that kind of thing. I guess what I'm proposing is to encourage the young. Self reliance. Personal responsibility. A feeling of competence and the knowledge to back it up. Not just a participation trophy. These values are core values to the motorcycle life style. They are central to a life with meaning. Now sailing, flying and extreme hiking, like the Appalachian Trail, also are routes to these same values. All promote that same level of involvement that is centered on personal competence. All are worthy activities. I'd bet there isn't a person here who would debate whether a life spent in front of a computer screen in a big city, actually has value to the person living it. I'm the last of my group. All the guys, every one, that I rode with in the late '70's and early '80s are gone now. Few of them mentored anyone. I was lucky enough to be the neighborhood Dad for some kids, for a few years. I have about 10 kids that are not "mine" to whom I will always be Dad. There is no higher calling. Some folks might consider this a negative kind of post but it's not. What we do and how we've lived our "biker" lifestyle will last. You can see our values and power every day in the news. I will point out a common experience we've all had. I know we've all seen that nitwit who swings left, almost into the on-coming lane before he makes a right turn. Great grandpa had a long wheel base sedan/touring car in 1928, with wheels that couldn't be turned as far as a modern car. He had to turn wide just to make the corner. His kids and his kid's kids all modeled their driving habits based on how the generation before them drove. Ways of living persist for generations. They persist long after the car and it's driver passed into history. What we've done and how we did it will be modeled for a long time, but only if we keep reaching out to young and vulnerable children we can poison with our vicious biker values. Kidding. Our real and present job will always be to pass it on. Even the folks that no longer ride can do this just by being there for those that might want to know just what it's all about. For those that made it to the end of this missive, I recommend flushing the eyes with cold water for ten minutes and seeking medical attention if the irritation continues. I promise not to write another post like this ever. I can't. My brain gets too conflabercated to write for a week afterward.

I just did the same job on my CLASS system. My tip on cleaning the seats where the rubber cap on the solenoid plunger seals the orifice on the valve body, is to use a new rubber eraser on a lead pencil. It fits right into the hole, is easy to hold straight so the burnishing of the seal area is even. It has just the right abrasive to do the job evenly and quickly. Do blow out the eraser grit with compressed air.

Honest Puc, I've never seen a plug like that. The center electrode had a cut through it, a valley of sorts, most of the way across. About 1/3 of the side of the center electrode was blown off down to the ceramic. The other thing was that the cut part looked like welding slag in coloration and in texture, under a magnifying glass. It looked like someone tried to tig weld it and forgot to turn on the shielding gas. Anyway, it ohmed out as open, but it still fired at idle. ???? But not above, say, 1500 rpm. How does that work ?? Electrical weirdness, I'll say.

OK, didn't do much of a check before. Now I have a plate, insurance, and the state required helmet. Took the bike out for a real ride. I've got some work to do. First impressions, I forgot to top off the air in the rear tire. I think it has 32 psi. Not enough for good tracking on the rear. Front end is loose. It's the steering neck bearings. Not real bad, but at the head of the list to fix this fall. Bike is so down on power it can hardly get out of it's own way. Over the winter, I tested the spark by putting a spare plug in each cap and spinning the motor over. All good. Got back and checked the pipes out. Left muffler was noticeably cooler than the right one. Left front pipe was cooler than the right one. Pulled what must be the most burned up plug I've ever seen, out of the #2 cylinder. That's what the problem was. I've pulled all the plugs, 4.1K ohms, 3.9K ohms, 4.2K ohms, 17,000,000 ohms. Don't quite know how that plug actually fired that cylinder at all. It idles fine. New plugs should fix the power issue. Then there's the oil leak, a classic stator wire leak. I guess that's next on the fix list. Folks will think it's a Triumph. Anyway, did the copper wire trick on the exhaust gaskets and it worked super ! Rebuilt the rear master cylinder. The clutch and front brake master cylinders will get rebuilt come winter. Compression is good. Will get into the vacuum advance if I'm still down on power with the new plugs but I'm thinking I won't be.

I pulled and ditched the CB, early in the rebuild. Never thought to check the headsets. Now I have all the audio functions, but I'm thinking the microphones are routed thru the CB harness somehow. I can hear the FM/AM radio through the headsets or the speakers, but there is no communication (voice) thru the microphones. There is, in the CB manual here, instructions about disconnecting the audio from the main wiring harness and plugging the CB audio in. Could this be the reason I've lost the comm system ? Anyone know where this plug is located ? Looks like I'll be pulling the fairing apart again... Am I on the right track ? I thought unplugging the CB connection to the amplifier would be all I needed to do. Plugged in, or not, the symptoms are the same. The mics don't work on either headset but everything else does.

This was not a well thought out question on my part.. I've considered this for a bit and I don't think there is any way to use an IR thermometer as a substitute for an exhaust gas analyzer. While an IR meter is awesome for troubleshooting cylinder that is not firing or firing intermittently, it's not useful for tuning. The processes suggested by the folks who've replied here are better alternatives than fussing with a tool never designed for that task. Thanks to all of you that weighed in on this.

I don't have access to an exhaust gas analyzer which would easily solve this. I have a steady even idle at a normal speed. I have the pilot jet screws set at 2 1/2 turns out. Earlier I had them set at 1 1/2 turns and the idle was weak and the pipes quickly turned blue after a 1/2 mile test drive. I believe that was way too lean. Things seem OK now, but the color tune has a way too wide window for the "blue" condition, basically from 1 1/2 turn to 3 1/2 turns on the pilot screw. I will chase better mileage later with the needle kit from skydoc, and by reading the plug colors, but for right now I am looking at having a more accurate idle mixture. The basic have been covered. I have a hot spark on all cylinders, good compression, and the carbs are totally clean and synced. Perhaps I'm picking nits here. If so, let me know. The symptom I'm concerned about is that my venture requires several minutes from the initial start, before I can ride off on it. Once it's warmed up enough to shut off the enriching circuit to about 1/2 choke, I'm good and the engine is strong enough to ride. After 2 minutes of riding, the enrichener can be shut off completely. Prior to that, it stalls easily. So it seems clear that I'm probably still a little lean. I was speculating that the final adjustments might be done with an IR lazer thermometer. The parameters of of the process of getting useful data from an IR reading are daunting. A patch of flat black paint is needed so the reflectivity is the same on all pipes. There is the problem of the forward cylinders having a double wall and the rear cylinders having a single wall. Lastly, what temperatures am I looking for ? There are many other variables, how long and how hard the engine was run prior to the measurements, how long it sat at idle before measurements, ambient temperatures when the measurements are taken and so forth. The IR themometer is good if you have a cylinder that is not firing and spots that easily but can it be used for anything beyond gross adjustments ? Has anyone done this ? If so, what did you do ?

That frame was the score of the month. Pardon my being distracted, but that's your shop ?? WOW. I'm used to dim light, excess moisture and oppressive clutter. What an awesome setup you have there. You are not going to have any issues doing whatever you need to, as you get your ride back together.