Squidley

We have some pretty talented fart smellers here, I have used several of them on many occasions

Thats a fact Mark, I'll make sure I send him back on the plane with PLENTY of M&M's Here are some pics of the pups I just took...

I dont think you'll have to pull the motor to get the heads off. I may be mistaken, but you'll damn near pull everything else off on the top. I think your making the right call on taking the heads off. If you believe your going to keep the bike for the long haul I would just have both heads redone and have that piece of mind....

No problem Mark, we'll feed him with lots of sugar and let him pick the one he wants, maybe 2 of them! and send him back to y'all Thanks folks for the kind words, like I mentioned when the spirit gives you that calling, you tend to listen to it. I wont lie they are a LOT of work, but a labor of love because they are worth having a good life. I'll get some pics up shortly so y'all can see our "Babies"

If your having a valve issue that you can see, I would pull the head off and go through them. Even if you have to redo the valves, it's easier than hoping that it will work itself out. I dont know any way of cleaning valves from the inside the motor.

He's blessed me many times over Dave....Thanks Buddy

Gene, I have a set of boards for a 1st gen, they came off an '83 that I have here. I am not positive if the boards were all interchangeable from the MKI's to the MKII's. If we can get some info on whether they will work of not, we can see about coming to a price for them. 1st gen floorboards are very hard to come by, and they dont go cheap if your lucky enough to find a set. Lets see if some of our resident experts can give us a hand with this and we'll go from there.

No, not Lonna I have been absent on the site due to an unexpected arrival at our home, quintuplet puppies. No, we dont have a female that gave birth, it's actually a bit sad to be honest with y'all. Friday night Lonna and I went to dinner in Conroe, which is about 15 miles from where we live here in Cleveland. Left about 7 for supper, and an hour and a half later we were heading home. Got 2 driveways from our house and Lonna told me she saw a cage with something in it, I totally jonesed it and drove right past it. We turned around to come up on 1 puppy, standing his ground at the last thing of normalcy in his life at that second. Now I can tell you that we took the same way home as we did going to supper and that cage wasn't there at 7pm. So some nimrod pulled off the side of the road and dumped this cage off and drove off. Now what Lonna didn't see when we turned around was the other critter cross the road, but I did. As she was trying to coax this 1st little one to her I went across the street to see what it was that crossed in front of me. Lo and behold, here is another little pup, then in the glow of my flashlight, 3 more sets of eyes are staring at me 5 puppies, about 12 weeks old that some &%$#@! dumped to fend for themselves....I wasn't happy. We ended up coaxing 3 of them to us and took them to the house with the ramshackle cage. I went back to try and get the other 2 as they weren't having anything to do with me when we got the other 3. I was there for 45 additional minutes trying to get them to come to me (took about 30 minutes to get the 1st 3) and I finally had to say good luck to them and I went home. Saturday morning rolls around, I have to go get puppy food, collars, treats and all the other things that puppies need, but 1st I had to see if I could get the other 2. So back down to the spot and sure enough they had hunkered down for the night right there. I coaxed the 4th one out with some treats and took him back home to Lonna with the other 3. Back down again for #5 and that one was the hardest one, took me another 30 minutes to finally get him. He even decided to take a taste of my finger due to being extremely freaked out at how I had to grab him fast. So now we have 5 puppies, no food, and they are all in this pos cage in my garage. Off to Walmart to get food and such, call Heather (our vet tech daughter) and fill her in. She tells Dad, get this and this and this, but not that, oh and this...an hour or so later I get back home. OK, now what? time to build a kennel to keep them in so we can somewhat regulate them. The rest of Saturday is spent building a kennel on an 8X8 concrete slab we have by the garage. The dogs sleep in the old cage, in the new kennel that night. Sunday morning, feeding time! get that hurtle performed, peed and pooped and back in the kennel. Can't have them in the piece of crap cage they were thrown away in. Lets go to breakfast, and then Home Depot and pick up building materials to make the tashma hall of dog houses. So Heather and Rob came back out again Sunday (Rob helped me build the kennel on Saturday) and off to the races we go with making a dog house for them all. 4 hours later, there is a humongus palace for the pups to reside in. So now all this week we have been taking care of all the pups, have them up on CL looking to find them good homes for a small re homing fee (recoup the $800 I have invested in them thus far) I'm not a preacher, but the hand of God works in mysterious ways. I felt the nudge as I know he wanted us to take care of his babies here, so thats our mission right now, to find the 4 of them good homes, yeah, I said 4, we are keeping one I know your saying Brad, what the hell kind of dogs are they, and I'm gonna tell y'all here, but I couldn't resist keeping you wondering. They are a Rottweiler Black Lab mix, and they are beautiful. 2 of them are a complete Lab looking pup, 3 of the are Rottie. we are keeping the alpha female, she is the biggest of the pups and is as clumsy as they come. Now I have to tell y'all, and your probably going to laugh at us, but we named them in the only way I knew how to....by the color of their collars for the most part. you see I could only get 4 different color collars, and there's 5 pups. The pup we are keeping is Pink, then there is Red, Blue, Blackie, and the last one also has a black collar, but is a beautiful brown color...so he's Brownie. I told you that you were gonna laugh. We will take care of these pups until we can procure good homes for them. Pinkey, yeah thats what we call her, will stay with us, and I am very excited to have another dog after 17 years without one. So thats the story, sorry it was a novel, we have pics but they are on our phones and I haven't had the chance to try and get them on the computer. As soon as I can get them transferred or take some pics with the digital I will show you our "Family"

Sorry I have been silent on all this, stupid busy right now. Today was a good day, albeit a week behind where I wanted to be due to Quintuplets at our house (more later on that) The trailer frame has been completely stripped, sandblasted and now is in primer awaiting the black top coat tomorrow morning. I have taken the liberty of purchasing new Timken bearings and installing them and a pair of bearing buddies on the hubs. I absolutely dont trust china bearing as I have had them fail and I take exceptional care of my trailers with grease and maintenance. It's just more peace of mind knowing that there are top quality bearings in this trailer. I am having a friend of mine at work (who owes me a few favors ) sand the cargo body of the trailer and I will shoot that with the same black as the trailer frame. Then I will completely rewire it, and the Texas crew will "embelish" it We will get it to the west coast come hell or high water, I think you will like it when you see it

All the best to you and your family Dan, her youth makes it so much harder. I hope you folks find the peace you need.

Steve, I'm a bit confused about 6 pin vs 13 pin, this is just for the brake lights correct, or am I missing something here? It should just be a 6 pin for the tail and turn signals, I'm not sure what the compressors would have to do with it

It's funny you mention that Lutz, I had never thought twice about intake manifolds until this bike. All the bikes I have ever carb synced had wide open tubes on the intake manifolds. These did not, and 2 other bikes at MD didn't either. They had VERY tiny holes in what can be best described as caps over the tubes. I have don't literally hundreds of carb syncs and I never recall seeing tiny pin holes like these ones. They were clear, as I took a torch cleaning tip in all of them and they were clear.

It's nerve wracking the 1st time you do it, but you'll get hooked just like I did. If there is 20+ people and your all going to go for a ride after, break it up into 2 groups. Ask one of the members who might have some Road Captain experience if he would be willing to lead a 2nd group. Keep it about 10 to 12 in a group, I have lead 30 bikes and that is VERY challenging to do, especially if your in any kind of city. Have your ride mapped out, and explain it to all that are going for the ride. Give some basic information on hand signals and keep less experienced riders in the front to middle of the pack. Slow your ride pace down, there WILL be an accordion effect taking off from lights and stopping. Last of all, enjoy yourself, there is nothing like looking in your rear view mirrors and seeing a dozen or more brothers and sisters riding with you

That looks familiar

Ok...here we go I had written out a nice detailed post and then the site timed me out, so I lost it all. Before I took a hammer to my computer , I turned it all off and walked away for the night This is what we did, Compression test, all 4 cylinders are great 200 lbs so that takes out the valves and rings from the issue. Performed the test for the Throttle position sensor, if I read it right, which I believe I did, we are within the parameters that the manual specifies. So that's another thing to not interfere. While we did the compression test, we installed new plugs. Mind you none of what we did had a difference. We took off the mufflers to insure they weren't blocked, no change and still no vacuum. I know others had mentioned about insuring the carbtune was working properly. We tried it with 2 different ones that had been used earlier in the day to sync other bikes. I believe that this is a carb issue, perhaps the butterflies are total out of whack and I couldn't get them right without taking the carbs back off. I'm also leaning towards the idle circuit in the carbs could be clogged up, the bike runs fair under acceleration and at cruising RPM's in the 2500 to 4K range. I'm gonna have Mark bring it to my place and he can crash over here for the night. We'll strip the carbs off and completely go through them. Let them soak over night to really clean them and rebuild them. Then I can look at the butterflies and bench set them before we install them again so it will be closer to set with the carbtune. So that's it in a nutshell right now, more to come, and Mark did make it home

Mirrors are a tough one, and I don't have any spares. The CDI the same way, but get with Dingy here on the site as he sells an updated TCI unit that will work for your '83. A new windshield is available for about $90.

Lots of good folks here Kyle, glad we could help get you rolling a little better.

Fred, If you have the factory cassette deck and it still works, get a cassette adapter and use it in the deck. You can go and get any MP3 player and plug it into the adapter and run it through the bikes speakers. I have been doing it for years on my 1st gens...

Bill, The Vmax gears will absolutely help with more umph, it will raise your rpms in 5th gear about 500 rpms at same cruising speed. Another thing you might consider is going with a Dyna 3000 ignition kit on your bike. You can change the timing curve of the engine and raise the rev limited as well. These 2 things will give you more useable power. Your fuel consumption is unfortunately not going to change a whole lot. Make absolutely sure that your carb floats are set properly and that the carbs are synced right. This will help with your fuel consumption.

YES I'll fill in some of the blanks, at idle rpms, there is no vacuum on the carbtune. When I tried to set the sync at a high rpm (about 3000) I would not get much vacuum, but got some. We did pull the rear plugs and both sides sparked with the plugs that were in them when they were outside of the cylinders. We actually did make some headway, when Mark rode in he had to run with the choke on or the bike just wouldn't run. It also would die when you gave it throttle. When he left tonight it would run without the choke on and he could give it throttle and it not die, so we made some headway. I fought with it for 30 minutes at high rpm with the carbtune and got somewhat close to a sync, but with very low vacuum. We are going back tomorrow and play a bit more. I am going to do a compression test on the cylinders. I will also run through y'alls suggestions and try to get this figured out. I usually don't get stumped on these bikes, but this one has me scratching my head Thanks for all your help

We are working on one of the members RSTD's here at Houstons MD. We have an '05 TD that has zero vacuum when we tried to carbsync it. The right side of the bike warms up pipes get hot. The left side is VERY slow to warm up. We took the carbs off, set floats, checked jets and the whole 9 yards. I know about checking for a massive vacuum leak, we have checked all I know to check. I understand that vacuum is created on the intake stroke of the piston and all that. I am totally at a loss for why we dont have vacuum. my brain is somewhat fried rigt now from 11 hours of MD, if any of y'all have some words of wisdoms or had this happen to you, what did you do to correct this issue. Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

If you haven't had the carb sync checked that would be one of the 1st things I would do. I would also check all your vacuum lines and vacuum caps for being in good shape. Popping could be it sucking air somewhere. You mentioned replacing the coils, did they come with new caps on them? if not I would invest in plug caps for it as there is a resistor inside them that can get corroded and cause weird things to happen. If your battery is the original in the bike I would also have it load tested. This bike is VERY finicky on electrical power and will cause a lot of grief if the battery or charging system isn't up to snuff.

Happy Birthday Annie....from TEXAS!!!

Happy Birthday Bob!!!

Good on him, keep up the fight and when you see him next tell him were still rootin for him!