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oldandcrotchety

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Everything posted by oldandcrotchety

  1. oldandcrotchety
    i live 2 miles down a gravel road and my bike handles as well on it as it does on the pavement. only reason i go slower than the highway is that the curves can be treacherous (leaning on gravel) and i have to watch for potholes. but i regularly go about 35 mph and sometimes catch myself going 45 mph. this was not always the case, though. when i first got this bike i could barely go faster that about 15mph and i was having to herd it from ditch to ditch and could barely keep it upright. it just wanted to wander everywhere and it was only with extreme effort that i could keep it from sliding out from under me. i was told that maybe the steering head bearings were loose, so i checked them and found out that they were in fact too tight! i loosened them slightly and the difference was amazing. may not be answer for you, but it sure cured my problems.
  2. oldandcrotchety
    you shouldn't have to take anything off to replace the exhaust gaskets. there is a ring that holds the exhaust pipe to the manifold. it has a bolt through it to hold and kind of squeeze pipe and manifold together. the gasket goes in there. just take the bolt out and open the ring far enough to move it back off the flange, slip your new gasket in and then button it back up. however, i found that the little flat copper factory gaskets ain't all that great. i just cut a piece of romex (about 10 or 12 ga) the right length, make it into a ring the right size and use it instead. the round wire seems to seal a whole lot better. least wise it does for me.
  3. oldandcrotchety
    mine squeal until they get warmed up................
  4. oldandcrotchety
    yep, yep.......i can add my latest seafoam experience to the mix. a friend of mine bought a 1983 honda GL650 that had been sitting for at least 4 years. that's what the owner had told my friend. i would bet that it had sat twice that long after looking at it. long enough for the front tire to be totally ruined. anyway he brought it to me to see if i could get it roadworthy for him. he thinks that just because i used to be an auto mechanic and have been a long time rider that i know how to wrench on bikes.....which i don't. but i agreed to do what i could. it took a little time and effort to clean up (you wouldn't believe how many spiders can live in a neglected bike) but the only real issue after i got the calipers cleaned up and cables lubed, etc. was would it run. i was holding my breath. i just knew we would have to pull them carbs. i just hate carb work. i put a small amount of gas in the tank and a put in a new battery. i cranked it up and in a short time it fired and almost ran. it would run for a few seconds, then die. i also noticed that the right carb was dripping. i turned off the gas and had my friend go buy a can of seafoam and bring it to me. i poured it in the tank and then cranked and ran, cranked and ran and so on until i knew i had the bowls full of almost straight seafoam. i could smell it. turned off the petcock again and quit until the next day. went out and cranked it up and this time it would stay running, although not very smoothly. i put a few gallons of fuel in the tank and walked off til the next day. cranked it up again and ran it a few seconds until it quit smoking from the strong seafoam mix. the right carb no longer leaked and i decided to try and sync the carbs. no go. adjustment screws didn't do anything at all. waited another day and went out and cranked it up. this time i was able to sync the carbs. the screws worked right and after the syncing the bike ran like a new one. thank God for seafoam.....................
  5. oldandcrotchety
    Leaving off the oil plug is really not a bad blooper. after all, you had a large pool of oil to not only tell you that you made a mistake, but what the mistake was. easy fix and no lasting damage. now......let me tell you about my friend, carl, who did almost the same thing. he put the plug back in "finger tight" and then got sidetracked and forgot to tighten it on down. put in the oil and down the road he went.....until the plug backed out. you have any idea where the oil goes when it comes out of the drain plug while the bike is going down the highway at 60 or so? 'hint' the rear tire is directly in line with it.......................
  6. oldandcrotchety
    yeah, hwy 23 is curvy in the extreme and kinda steep in places. one time i was driving a stationwagon up 23 and went around a curve just a little too fast and ran into my own back bumper........btw rosebud, it's pig trail, not tail..........
  7. oldandcrotchety
    Hey Bigin, i used to live on hwy 123, but i was on the tame end, down towards lamar. hwy 21 between clarksville and berryville is ok if you like a road that is just a little twisty, but not extreme. but my favorite is interstate 40, i grew up in the twisties and am glad to get away from them...............
  8. oldandcrotchety
    well it just takes a whole lot to embaress me. dropping my bike in front of others certainly doesn't rise to that level. in fact, if i drop a bike i hope for a crowd so someone can help me pick it up. worse thing would be all alone in a situation where i couldn't get it up off the ground by myself, like maybe if it was laying on a slope with the wheels on the uphill side.
  9. oldandcrotchety
    thanks AWSMSRV but i've already been to that page. that is the window i was referring to in my post that lets you look up applications by vehicle make and model, which would tell me the amsoil replacement for the stock yamaha filter, but as i said, i have a rivco spin-on oil filter adapter on my bike that uses a car filter instead of the stock one. it uses a fram ph3950, but i have no idea what kind of car or truck that it is normally used on. it's no big deal, though. fram is a decent filter and i wouldn't have to use an amsoil filter with amsoil, i just was curious if the amsoil filter was in fact better than any of the others. i think i may google up and see if i can just find a cross reference table that would list both the fram and the amsoil filter.
  10. oldandcrotchety
    i was thinking about using amsoil myself, at the next change. is an amsoil filter an advantage over national brand? when i went to the amsoil website i didn't see a filter cross reference other than from the old amsoil filter to the new one. so i would have no idea which amsoil filter number to order. they also had a window to look up according to vehicle make and model, but that was no good as i have a rivco spin-on adapter. I'll probably just stick with the fram for a filter. man.....i thought 9.25 a quart was pretty high, but up at the supercenter the other day i saw that the full synthetic motorcycle specific oil there was almost 8.00 a qt, so i guess amsoil price is about right. i'm hoping a full synthetic will make for smoother shifting. i know when i change oil i get much smoother shifts for about a thousand miles, then it starts to clash a bit on occassion.
  11. oldandcrotchety
    And, by the way, I'm no motorcycle mechanic at all, but I was an auto mechanic for years, and if this was on a car I would say that it sounds like a classic description of a plug wire that is weak. Miss at low rpm and then finally starts carrying the juice at higher rpms. Sumpin to check anyway...........
  12. oldandcrotchety
    Is what you are saying is that you have a dead miss, or a "almost dead" miss until you get up in the rpms? If so, what you might try is to let it warm up and then disconnect one plug wire at a time and see if it makes a differance. If you pull one of the wires and it makes no difference to the idle then you have isolated the problem to that one cylinder. Then it could be addressed individually for the problem. You could then replace the plug and see if it fixes it, then the wire, the cap etc., one piece at a time. I know you said you have already replaced most things, but it never hurts to try rechecking. I have, on rare occassions, gotten a bad plug or wire brand new right out of the box and ran me nuts cause I assumed everything had to be good.
  13. oldandcrotchety
    Hey, I'm with you, pegscraper. RS used to be a good store decades ago, but something has happened. Maybe it is because long ago most of the store owners were electronics geeks that loved the business and now it is just a store that someone bought as a business venture with no knowlege of electronics. Another trend i've seen over the last decade or so is to hire kids to run stores (not just RS, but all kinds of stores). So many of the kids are clueless about anything, but i guess they are cheap. Here is what happened to me one time with radio shack. When I was living in Prairie Grove, i went over to Fayetteville to the Radio Shack and bought this little tiny soldering torch. It's the kind that has a little bottle of propane about the size of a co2 cartridge. very useful for soldering when you aren't close to electricity. Anyway, bout ten years ago we moved down here to logan county and one day i go into paris RS to buy new propane cartridges for it. when i asked where they were he said "that's not a RS item". I say "really? when did they stop carrying it?" Him: "Never was a RS item" Me: "sure it was, that's where i bought it from" Him: "no, you must have gotten it somewhere else, RS has never had anything like that" Me: "look in the catalog, you'll see it" Him: "no need to look, I know it's not there, RS has never had such an item, you'll have to go to where you got it from is all i can tell you"...............well ok, i give up. so, I drove over to the town of Ozark which is 15 miles away and when i walk into the radio shack the bottles i was looking for were right there on an end cap next to the door. go figure. clerk said they were always in stock. popular item.
  14. oldandcrotchety
    what size should the new cables be?
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