Showing posts with label air box. Show all posts
Showing posts with label air box. Show all posts

Monday, September 27, 2010

S.O.S.

The last week or two have been rather disappointing to say the least.
After the last successful rides (which were almost two weeks ago now) I basically haven't been able to get her running again.
At first it was starting but idling only on the left cylinder. We did some tinkering with carb settings trying to be sure both were synced but, and we cleaned the air filters which were pretty nasty, and we put it all back together and then we swapped the wires for the condensers and the spark plug wires to see if that would get the right cylinder firing and tell us if the one cylinder thing was electrical or mechanical...
And now she's just dead in the water. Won't start at all. Switched everything back and still nothing.
It seems that there is spark at both points, but it seems weak at best, and weaker (to the point of maybe being intermittent) on the right. Same at the plug. Spark on both, weaker on the right.
I don't totally know what I'm looking at, but I have to say that the spark doesn't look all that healthy on the left when you get right down to it but like I say, I haven't got any real experience with it.
We've tried disconnecting different circuits to see if something was maybe shorting out and causing a drain on the power, and that hasn't helped.
Tried some new condensers, and that didn't seem to make any difference either.
The condensers and coils seem to pass the bench tests outlined in the Clymer manual, but from what I understand those aren't necessarily definitive as to whether the coil is good or not.
I guess we need to pull the air-boxes back off and see if something we did back there knocked something loose, but it doesn't seem like there was anything that much back there that would prevent it from starting.
At this point we're kind of at a loss and lacking a solid strategy that makes much sense.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Do it right the first time...or do it over

I was kind of embarrassed to admit it the other day but...
I did mention that it took me the best part of an hour to figure out how to get the first air box on the other day.  What I didn't mention was that I wound up taking it back off the next day.
Friday I put on the left side of the air cleaner.  Then I started to install the carburetors.  I put the left side on first since I was already on that side having just put the air cleaner on, and I found it rather awkward to work on.  The whole time I was tightening up the inside mounting bolt on that left carburetor I was thinking to myself; "How am I ever going to be able to get the other carb on, there's not going to be any room to work."
So I tried it for a while before I reluctantly admitted that the only way I was going to be able to get in there to tighten that inside bolt and hook the right throttle cable up was to take the right side of the air cleaner back off and bolt the mounting flange on first.  Then the loosely assembled carb and air cleaner went back on with no problem and it wasn't nearly as hard getting the air cleaner back on after I'd had all that practice.
Maybe that is the way it's supposed to go....maybe that's what the manual says and I just missed it...most likely the  manual says "installation is the reverse", and since it's been three months or more since I took it apart...
I'm actually amazed that I haven't had more trouble finding everything after all that time what with boxes of parts getting more or less randomly moved around and shoved into various cabinets and closets during little fits of tidying up the garage now and then over the last few months.