What did you do to your Yamaha today?

My record keeping is a little less legible ...

 

Looks good to me

 

So I started thinking about the accuracy of my compression gauge and puffed it with my air compressor... readings were all over the place. Sometimes it would read higher and others were lower but never twice the same so it went in the scrap pile and I took a trip to the local pawn shop where I found an older Kent-Moore gauge set for $100 which I gladly paid, Made in USA.
Screwed it into the #1 jug and puff...puff...puff right away its showing 140 after three passes and all the jugs are within a few pounds. Not quite the book spec given the slight seep of the exhaust valves but good enough where I felt comfortable running it another year and today was the official start of my riding season and I took it out for a shake-down run. A little chilly but with two layers I was good enough for a 30 mile run up & down Hwy 65 going for the redline on the shifts. Feels alright... not great running rich and breaking up on the top end, at first I thought it was lean so I gave it some start lever and it got worse. Floats are at spec but I'm running #124 mains right now so tonight it's swap in a set of #122's and if it's warm enough tomorrow we'll see how it runs.
Overall it was a good run and getting back on the saddle felt great. Been too damn long!


Someday I will put the resistor back in for the BATT warning... maybe.

 

I purchased my resistor from Axe-Man Surplus in St. Paul. I live the of things you can find there.

 

Grew up in that AxMan on University & Fry

 

Long story short & Yamaha related... Most of the "newer" blue cabinets of resistors along the row before the east wall and on the end of that row came from my late Elmer & mentor who got me into motors with two wheels first Rupps then the one year only YZ50 the summer of 1980. He ran a little sideshow called Midwest Recreation and worked with the YMCA, we were neighbors and he got me involved with his program. He was also a brilliant albeit scatter-brained electrical engineer who had numerous patents from his time at Magnetic Peripherals (before becoming Seagate) where he designed the head amplifier used in hard drives that's used today and Cardio-Labs (?) and he worked with Dr. Jarvik designing the brains of the early pace makers. His passion was motorcycles and after the loss of his fiance he focused this to the kids programs. During the 1980's he was a one-third owner of a high end audio/video boutique called Audio Innovations located in the Edina galleria and got me a "job" if you will as a gopher/stockboy/cleaner, I also had the task of cleaning and maintaining the bikes used in the program and in return all of my "wheel time" was free and I had first dibbs on whatever bike I wanted to run. He was a Yamaha man but also had a Honda CR500XL which I managed to tame.
So fast forward to the 2000's. He started having memory problems and eventually succumbed to dementia, two years prior to this he lost his home of over 60 years to a foreclosure as he forgot to pay on an equity loan so before the doors were locked everything was cleared out. He had rows upon rows of those blue parts cabinets full of everything you could imagine and most everything was bought up by AxMan and put out on the floor as it is today. The significance here is most of the labels on the drawers were handwritten by me over time, appropriate they would end up in a retail museum, that particular one in the picture was written by him.

His name was Mike Boot callsign KD0SB with the SB being Super Biker.

 

I'm starting to think a little SECA get-together could happen at the AxMan store this year... thoughts?

 

So back to the topic.
Added two 80s vintage lights to the Atari and a resistor directly to the battery sensor lead. Left red light is a brake light confirmation as my brakes are rather quick to apply and don't always show the rear light right away and the right hand light is for the fog as I don't always see is on say on a cloudy day. I reloaded them with LEDs and tucked everything in the Atari housing.

 

Not perfect, but all within spec now.

 

More like right on the money.

 

I'm in! I would never pass up a chance to hit the Axe Man!!

 

So the latest from my end is a new clutch cable from the folks in Medford Wisconsin. An aftermarket piece that thankfully was NOT made in China but everything feels just as it should. Routed it in this morning and set the relaxed play, now I have to wait for the polar vortex to make its way out so I can take it for a run down the highway. Also got the oil filter element, a WIX 24934 and will be making a trip to the local unfriendly Walmart for a jug of Rotella T4 and some of that zinc fortified STP in the little blue jug.

Last night was doing battle in the headlight bucket with some of the wiring, when I switch the fog over to the alleged high-power Hella I ran a separate power and ground up but not in the vinyl wire sleeves so everything got pulled down, cleaned and checked over before I pulled the high current wires in and terminated them. Power is controlled by a 20A Bosch cube relay fired via the thumb switch on the right side pod which gets supplied thru the headlight relay. Also reworking the little +5 volt DC supply I was using for the Garmin, that has been replaced with a RAM mount for the smartphone and three more USB DC cables are being run for the GoPro cams. Was going to use a smallish USB hub but the cameras have a higher demand for charging. This might change if I can find something suitable.

So how many SECA's could we line up along the side of AxMan? I think a row of them would get some attention.

 

If you ride over to my place I could put it 3 900s, a 750, and a 550 Seca.

 

Maybe it could be a meet at a location who has the most? Dunno but I'm for a SECA meet either way.

 

The most Secas? Looks like you guys might as well go to The Central New York Carburetor Clinic at @hogfiddles.

 

That might impose a question of insanity.

 

So back to the bike, pulled the oil pan off this evening with the intent of cleaning out the level sender of whatever was holding it up and found this... a big fat nothing. Not a flake of metal, no chewed up chain guide just a tiny little of that super fine crud from the 40-some years and 43,850 miles in the back corners. Given the wrestling match I had getting the pan off I'd say this is the first time since the engine was assembled. Starting to believe I have more of a gem than previously thought.
Further inspection using a camera shows the inside of the engine to be Zestfully clean and the pickup screen is completely clear of anything.

 

So I ordered the engine gasket set today as I'm going to at the minimum pull the head and lap the valves, a question I've been battling is how much slack should the starter drive (HiVo) chain have and what the acceptable limits are. Bike has 43,850 miles on the clock with the majority of them on city streets and that chain isn't pulling much more than the alternator or being pulled by the starter so I don't see much stretching it but I'd like to make sure anyway. Factory book has nothing that I can find and I'm not seeing anything in the xjbikes tech section so maybe someone here could give me a better idea? Pushing it up hard from below yields about a half inch of play which to me seems loose but acceptable.

 

12.5mm your chain has, new chain has around 6mm of play so l think it is acceptable. Your chain won't be close to the oil nozzle.

 

Didn't think it was bad or out of spec but I always value a second opinion. Thanks Franz.

So more poking around reveals the real reason for the stuck low oil indicator and occasional ignition miss on coil #2... Wires running along that side of the pan that are secured with the little springy clips are chewed thru and appears to have been intermittently shorting, when I got the bike I noticed the black (ground) for the trigger coils had been cut thru but thought maybe the PO had done this and never gave it a thought but looking closer it was the little clips wore thru the outer jacket and eventually chewed the wires. A few layers of heat shrink are in order.