bike was running good, now its not....

Back story...

I had parked my XJ a while back due to it needing to be fixed and I had no cash to fix it. The I got it fixed but had no money to get the plates renewed and get insurance. So the bike sat for several years in the garage.

A couple months ago I pulled it out, drained the old gas out of the tank, changed the oil and filter and put it a fresh battery, fresh gas and a set of NGK sparkplugs. I fire it up just like i did before I had parked it, petcock to prime for about 30sec, choke on and hit start. It fired up on the third try and sputtered a bit and then settled into an idle. As it warmed up the idle started to clime so i would back the choke off until it would idle without the choke. At this point I took a quick ride around the neighborhood. Eveything seemed to be working properly. After making a few minor adjustments (tire pressure ect..) and doing some cleaning on the bike, a friend and i went for a weekend ride outside of town (135 miles). The bike ran fine with no signs of problems and when I filled up the tank on the way home i had gotten between 42-45mpg on the tank.

The following weekend we went for another ride (110 miles) and again, the bike was running fine and having no problems.

Then, due to various circumstances (travel, weather, schedule conflits and general lack of time) I have not been able to ride for 3-4 weeks.

Today i decided to pull the bike out and go for a short ride and run some errands. First problem, the bike did not want to start on anything but full choke and would never settle down to a steady idle. It dies if I turn off the choke even after warming up. When idleing with the choke on it will rev up and down and I can sometimes hear a miss or a "pup pup" sound. I also have no throttle response and if I try to rev the engine it just bogs down.

signed
bummed in Houston.

 

This happened to me ... overnight!
Fortunately, I had a clear, inline fuel filter to give me some indication of what happened.
Something in gas I bought along the Interstate was small enough to clog the filter, pass through the filter and mess-up the low-end metering ports.

You're going to have do some cleaning.
Even if you cleaned 'em yesterday ... you have to back in.

After you re-clean 'em ... be absolutely sure to install an inline filter to help prevent having to do it all over ... again!