No throttle response in second gear, and gears seem short.

I'm building a 94 xj600s.
Very recently got the bike road worthy after having the carbs gone through, replacing a few odds and ends and fabricating some mounts. Took her for my very first ride, and noticed that the gears seemed surprisingly short, and the throttle response in second gear was flat.

Some thing's to note are that this is my first bike (real actual motorcycle, I had a 150 scooter for a year), I don't have a tachometer, and the bike has straight pipes. So I don't have a very good frame of reference for what's going on.

When I say the gears seem short I mean the power range seems short, I feel the power drop to the degree that I feel like I need to shift. As for the throttle response it feels like I'm in too high a gear (at least from what my experience in cars tells me), when I slowly built the throttle it responds fine.

I'm thinking it could be something like a carb balance or tuning issue. Is it possible that it's user error and I'm just being novice with this set up?! I hope for works ske it's that simple, but it would be rather embarrassing.

So, what/how do I check?!!


Thanks every one!!

 

A temporary tacho would give you a much better idea of whats going on.
The open pipes will alter the exhaust gas dramatically and I know from experience that your fuel delivery becomes pretty funky if the basics have been altered too far.

 

HF,
congrads on the new to you bike. I see from your post that you used to have a scooter and now you have moved up to the motorcycle. I have to ask have you taken a motorcycle riding course yet? The MSF basic rider class is wonderful and will teach you all kinds of techniques that might save your life someday.

https://training.msf-usa.org/res/st...gfbpepns/ZENM7A==&zc=vRjEilu1COQPhnbbiKDQ+w==

As for your new bike, you don't have any past history for us? Did the PO have any words of wisdom for you? Each gear has its own power band that is a little different. As you start from gear one it is short and very powerful, second should be a little longer and so far on up the gears. As long as the sound of the rpms is even and whines up evenly, you bike should be working well. If is jumps in second on lurches as you get hard on the throttle, well then that might be something.

Keep us posted.

 

Since you're used to scooters, your also used to an engine that has to rev to move, but not used to needing to shift (I'm assuming that you came from a CVT scooter and not a shifty). Based on your description of how the power drops off I'll say that something isn't right (likely the carbs need to be gone through, and the exhaust returned to stock). The Seca II should pull hard from idle, and harder from 5,500 RPM until it hits the rev limiter (I'm fairly certian that the Seca II has one, unlike the ealier series of XJ).

My advice is to start by reading Read This First
While the Seca II isn't specifically covered, it is essentially an updated XJ550, and all the things that need to be gone through still apply.

 

Hopefully you have the stock air filter. The picture seems to be while the carbs were out for cleaning.

 

She has downdraft carbs. They are on the bike in the above photo.
Airbox is under the fuel tank.

 

A temp tach sounds like a wonderful idea, as the exhaust sounds pretty violent in higher RPMS, I think I'm p**** footing a bit, it'd be nice to know.
As for history I don't have much, all of the lights and a lot of the other electronics have been replaced and moved due to the tail changing. Bike sat for a while, had somebody do the carbs but I'm not sure I trust his work, so I'll probably just nut up and take a look myself, altho I consider myself a novice. I replaced the starter relay and rebuilt the starter, replaced the oil and gas in the bike.
The scooter was a cheap point and shoot Chinese bike, no shifting, you are correct K-moe. Am I correct in assuming a straight pipe would cause back pressure issues? I will read through READ THIS FIRST, thank you for that.
This picture was when fully assembled (aside from a tail light mount I recently fabricated), carbs are on (hard to see) and mounted under a stock air box (under the tank). I have disassembled the stock air box and it seemed ok, but a new filter is part of my parts list.
Let me know if I missed a response to something.

As I'm not doing anything that hasn't been threaded already, I haven't submitted pics or write ups, let me know if that needs to change.

Thank all of you for the responses, I appreciate the wisdom in knowledge being passed around, truly an amazing thing!!

 

READ THIS FIRST IS DEEEEEP!!!
Great read, and great use of external articles and YouTube videos. It was a lot to take in and I plan on going through it with a note book over the next few weeks.
Just to keep you all posted, I'm beginning to think it could be my valves, they're loud (something I'm gathering slowly is fairly common) and more than likely haven't been gone through for some time (something I'm gathering needs to be done fairly regularly). Although I'm surprised I can hear it over the clutch rattle (something else I'm fiuring out is common). Is a valve check and adjustment something that a rookie could accomplish safely?! Or is it a better bet to wait until I'm more tech savvy?!

 

As long as you get a manual for your bike and have the basic tools you should be fine. The link.
http://www.xjbikes.com/forums/threads/airhead-valve-adjustment-with-pics.14827/

You should be fine just read through it and make sure you have all the stuff. The shims will be the ones you will have to calculate and then wait on. Talk to the Shim Poll man on here, he will hook you once you have the size and number of shims you will need.

 

Valves are supposed to make noise (unless they have hydraulic adjusters).

Clutch rattle is not common on an XJ. You are either hearing something else, or there is a problem.

 

I've read that the "clutch basket" (pretty sure that's correct) gets noisy because of a pin that's not quite perfectly fitting.

 

That can happen, but it is not considered to be common. At least I only know of less than a dozen occurrences, so I suppose that it could be more common than I am aware of. Keep in mind that most of what we deal with here are the earlier generation bikes, and that updates to later machines are not always improvements. They can have issues that weren't evident in earlier iterations of any given assembly.

 

It woud be helpful if you could add the year and model of you XJ to you signaure. There are a lot of posts, a lot of different sub-models, and having that information in every post makes it easier to keep track of which machine we're dealing with.