Tuning trouble - I think

I am having trouble tuning my 83 GS450Ga. The bike is overall in pristine condition. I cleaned the carbs three times and got her running. The main issue I am having is a problem with the left cylinder running very hot. The pipe is now blue after I was working to get it started for the first time. I had a lot of problems with the idle, and the motor seemed very unblanced. So I cleaned the carbs for the second time anmd was able to get the bike to idle, but only one cylinder would fire until the bike got warm, then the other one got hot. When I first start the bike, I can actually get my face close to the right exhaust pipe and smell raw fuel. The plugs are both delivering good spark. I swapped the right and left coils and still the same issue. Cleaned the carbs again and stilll the same issue. I used and air hose and a lot of carb cleaner and virtually pressure cleaned all the ports and pathways in both carbs and soaked the jets in carb cleaner for an hour and blew air through each jet before re installing it.

The right plug comes out white and the left seems a bit dark, but the air mix is factory set. there seem to be no adjustments I can make other than float levels. But I am confident that the floats are ok. The bike would not go over 60 and surged after the 2nd carb cleaning, but now seems to have smoothed out and has more power. I will try a road test at highter speeds tonight. Overall the bike runs good, but I want to solve this heat issue before I sell it. I want to get top dollar, but if it looks great and runs sub-par, I cannot feel good about passing it on to another rider. What should I do...try another cleaning or try to balance the carbs? Any help would be appreciated.

 

This is a Yamaha XJ tech forum, there is a forum further down for "Other Motorcycles", I would recommend posting there for better assistance.

BTC

 

GS and XJ carbs are pretty close, they run the same style CV/s not sure if they Mikuni or Hitachi, so basically all the same principals apply. So the hot side, with the white plug is running way too lean.. mixture screw were factory set and then covered to prevent "tampering" ( I prefer the term tweaking myself ) You will most likely need to drill the cap out (carefully as not to damage the mixture screw) for each carb.

There's a great tutorial of on GSresources.com for carb cleaning... I used that in conjunction to Rick's carb cleaning guides here