What did you do to your Yamaha today?

Replaced 40 pilot jets with 42 jets on the '82 XJ650, will fire it back up tomorrow.
Trying to richen up the lower end, my idle mixture screws are at 4-5 turns out right now.

 

I put a right side cover on my bike. I had been searching for one for over a year until I ran across one on ebay. First time ordering something from Canada. It is from an 81 while the left one is from an 82 so the badges don't match but it looks better than the 3d printed one that I was running.

 

Fired my SECA for the first time since rebuilding the carbs, idle is a little snotty but it revs good and maintains an even idle speed without enrichment. Might have to play around with the pilot screws some to get things right, they came out during the rebuild and got new seals but I honestly don't recall the number of turns from bottom out they need to get into the ballpark, maybe someone can help me with that?
Going to do a shakedown run later this week, still have a little snow in the shady spots and I'm waiting for the new plate to arrive. Wednesday has a forecasted high in the middle 40's so unless I have a major catastrophe it will get its first 35-40 miles since 2016 when the original owner was forced to stop riding.
This evenings work is to seal the cam side plug and rig some of these super strong round magnets to hold the side panels in place, plastic bosses were long ago broken off and replaced with double sided tape... if nothing else I may resort to zip ties.
Will post my findings once the rubber hits the road.
Brhat

 

Brhatweed, there are 2 types of mixture screw threads, a coarse and a fine. According I recall course is 1 1/2 to 2 and fine is 2 1/2 to 3.
However, on both my bikes, those settings were on the lean side and I went richer. I'm fine tuning a carb myself and its cold here which makes bike on the lean side. I have to warm it up really well to judge how its doing.

 

Got it and thanks. Mine apparently has the fine threads so I'm going to do a color tune this afternoon as my dad has a clear plug for his Bonneville 750. I did pull the carb rack off again last night and double checked the passages all around, what I did find was the little O-ring in #3 had balled up and followed the screw down the bore so I suspect this is the problem, getting good with the rack R&R and I found boiling the airbox boots in hot soapy water really softens them up and makes them super easy to squeeze back on.
Found the source of my oil leak on the front cam plug, apparently the previous owner didn't get the plug radius in the lower groove correctly and this crushed the gasket, he later attempted to seal the entire gasket with black RTV which oozed out anyway. Got another gasket on the way and did check the valves, a little on the loose side but I can live with that. Did straighten out the gasket enough for a driveway run and I will post my results.

 

If you don't want to boil the boots, just use a heat gun. I've pulled/replaced carbs enough I can judge how hot they need to be. 140F is the point where average human hands can not put fingers on the hot object for more than a few seconds. circular motion flipping the boot around till soft is good for me. My lastest bike the '82 XJ650, someone previous to me got 2 of the boots too hot and they deformed some and have surface bubbles on them. Likely from getting TOO HOT.

 

By the time I actually get the boots in the water and over to where I'm working they're just at my limit of too hot to handle, I used to work in plastics so I guess my tolerance is rather high.

Sooo.... carburetors. I fought with them for about two hours and couldn't figure out what was *really* going on until I took and pushed the enrichment plunger down on the #2 carb and everything fell right into place. Just over 2 turns on the pilot screws got me the soft blue flame like what you'd see on the burner of a Coleman 413 camp stove burning pump gas across all four jugs and the idle is an even tone down to about 800 RPM just at the point of stalling. Running at about 1000 RPM it sounds like a healthy sport bike without sputters or puffing sounds. I live on a 3/4 mile private road so I took it thru three gears, two of which take the front end up just shy of 7000 with my fat@$$ over the tank. The motor feels crisp but the clutch is grabby and the throttle flares fast right off idle, I don't want to make the assumption that the SECA would be smooth like a Honda 750 or have the low end pull like my old CBX but this is a bit abrupt. I'm running Shell Rotella-T in the box and I believe the clutch is set correctly or as close as I can get without taking the side cover off and going thru the book procedure but maybe someone can offer some insight here.
The new license plate should be here tomorrow and the weather warmer than it was today, quite sure I will get some miles on the saddle. I'm small town with plenty of open county roads that eventually intersect so I can get an easy hundred miles without getting too far from home.

 

Clutch packs dry out over time. In the past I've stripped and cleaned the steel plates, checked over and oil soaked the fibre ones, replaced and all OK.
Maybe your clutch will improve with time?

 

Received a used headlight bracket to replace the bent one on the 82 XK650 Purchased recently. Installed it as well as put in bullet connectors on the after market LED turn signals that the PO put on the bike. Turn signals he drilled holes in the sides of the bracket for the headlight so had to drill those too.
He had spliced and wire nutted them in. Need to get into the turn signal relay he used. It changes speed something awful when the battery voltage changes. It won't run below 12.5V and when the bike is running it blinks really fast and changes speed. I don't like the turn signal lights. They are too close to the headlight for visibility by other vehicles. Same with the tail end. I'll likely put other cheapo LED turn signals on it.
Blinker control is an adjustable with a turn knob and he had to add a ground wire to it. I have some other aftermarket ones that I'll try.

 

I actually made my own 555 based turn signal flasher circuit with a relay output so I can use either lamp or LED. It has a fixed 1 second cycle time 1/2x1/2 second that works down to about 9 volts, works great except it wouldn't trigger the cancel timer circuit so I built another 556 based adjustable timer and stuffed it in the original Yamaha rubber sleeve. Basically it's a pair of one shots that when still has an adjustable cancel timer from between 15 to 90 seconds and another that is triggered with the speedo reed input to cancel after 10 seconds and I retained the OE connectors so the next whoever can return things to stock without having to undo my work.

Working on attaching some of these super power magnets to my side panels as the little pins that fit into the tank grommets have long since been busted off. I get them thru Amazon in a pack of six and they're quite strong.

Very nice Maxim you have there

 

nice to see others have used the 555 timer! That was a favorite chip of mine back in the day.

 

Any tech geek with a well stocked junk box can cobble up a 555 to do the job but for under $5 on eBay an adjustable flasher you have to ask yourself if it's really worth the effort! I've long ago given up on little projects like that for that exact reason.

 

I'm a bit of a fossil in that I will make a something on my bench using junkbox parts and perf board, by the dollars & cents no it doesn't pay when you can just order the same thru Amazon but doing it myself I can honestly say I made it myself. I really get frustrated with all the offshore junk Amazon and the others keep dumping on us that ends up in our landfills in sort order.

 

Magnets used to secure the side wings to the lower back of the tank. I have about 75 lbs of JIS hardware so finding the best screws is quite the challenge.

 

thx.
how hard is it for a ninny engineer in China to put a darn voltage regulator in the LED flasher module to make it not sensitive to voltage. geeze!
I'll report if the ones I have work or not. If not, I may just rip it open and put a regulator in myself. I think I have some at work that just drop 0.5V

 

I used a 9V zener and series resistor on the front and 2200 uf cap to smooth things out.

 

Today's shakedown run...


123 MPH didn't take long at all and the bike was stable, I on the other hand was about frozen over at 46F

 

Took it for a 120 mile ride in the country on a 55º day in February. Nice.

The "purposes" of the ride (aside from having some fun) were to (a) have some ice cream...


Mission accomplished.

(b) pick up a valve shim remover tool at my local motorcycle shop, also accomplished, and (c) to scuff in and check out the first tires this bike's gotten in something over 20 years. I wanted tires with at least some off-pavement capability, so my choices in the rear were pretty limited by the Maxim's 16" wheel. In fact, the intersection of 130/90-16, off-pavement capable, and tubeless contained exactly one tire, the Kenda K761, a tire that gets (shall we say) mixed reviews. Some complain about its performance in the wet, others say it's just fine and some folks need to learn how to ride. I will reserve judgment, as it was nice and dry out today (and anyway, before I go riding in the rain I want to replace the coils and plug wires). In the front I had more choices, and because the K761 was back-ordered (first promised in December, then late January, most recently late March) anyway, I went with the Dunlop Trailmax Mission. Almost undoubtedly a much better tire than the Kenda, and if I have to have one so-so tire and one really good tire, I'd prefer that the really good one be on the wheel with the disc brake.

Oh, and I should note that after we ordered the Dunlop front and canceled the Kenda, both tires arrived on the same truck. Of course. I still went with the Dunlop.

So I set off in search of all the curves I could find, which in the farm country west of Chicago ain't all that many... and most of them had been sprayed with beet juice, even though (far as I know) there is no snow in the forecast. Perhaps the road department has too much of the stuff left; aside from January it's been a mild winter. Anyway, beet juice can be slick, especially if it's a bit chilly, so I took it easy for a while. Both tires seemed to grip just fine. And then it was time to explore some of the pavement-free highways.


Where the road to nowhere meets the road from nowhere.

I managed to not photograph any of the bomb crater sized potholes, or the one squishy wet stretch where the bike moved around a bit, but overall I am happy with how the bike handles our mixture of dirt, clay, sand and a bit of gravel. Nice to not have to clean a chain after riding on dirty stuff.

The odometer turned over 8000 miles on the way home. Bike's barely broken in!

My next project is going to be doing something about the seat. It is waaaaay too low for my 34" inseam. No, I don't want highway pegs or forward controls; they're not any good for peg-standing. I doubt anybody makes a taller seat for this bike, so I'm just going to have to figure something out.

 

Get a Seca!

 

Installed the Amazon LED turn signal relay.
You have to remove one wire from the relay and then ground that terminal to use it. I think it then might just kill the self cancellation feature. Have not tested it.
Blinking speed is now consistant with voltage.

Also had installed headlight bracket and turns out the replacement was a little bent (in the other diretion than the one I pulled) but I bent it back. I knew my front fender was bent but after pulling that off to work on straightening it, I can now see the forks are misaligned so I'll be loosening things up and then straightening that back up.
The Brat/cafe style that the bike is, I'm not sure if I'll mess with the front fender or not. seeing people turn these bikes into bobbers and remove the front fender, I wonder how they can ride it without a fork brace that the fender works like