3 Day New Mexico / Arizona ride with bbjumper...

[Guest]

All loaded for the three night 1300 mile trip...

[azr]

That is one well packed bike. Have a great, safe ride. Is that a GPS up front? One thing that always is a bit of an issue for me and my girlfriend when we go tripping is the amount of weight at the back of the bike, her, full luggage etc. I know I need new rear shocks but I wonder if some people put items on the forks/front of the bike to help equal things out.

[MiloBramble]

That is one well packed bike. Have a great, safe ride. Is that a GPS up front? One thing that always is a bit of an issue for me and my girlfriend when we go tripping is the amount of weight at the back of the bike, her, full luggage etc. I know I need new rear shocks but I wonder if some people put items on the forks/front of the bike to help equal things out.

Yes that is a GPS up front, I also have a camera mount up there. I too need new rear shocks, just have not purchased them yet.

The packing set up worked well but as you can see by the date, I home home early. Bbjumper and I made Socorro New Mexico the first day (480) miles and decided to get a hotel room since there was so much forest fire smoke in the air. We had a great day 2 planned with a ton of stuff to see ending in Silver City New Mexico. We got about an hour out of town in higher elevation and I started have fuel/air issues. The bike would bog at 5500 rpm going up hill. We pulled the plugs and I was running rich. We hemmed and hawwed about what to do and decided to get to a lower elevation and head home. We did not want to be further away and risk a bigger problem. Once we got down in elevation it ran great, again. and we headed west. We did a 12 hour day with 540 miles.

This was a practice trip for a longer one we have planned in August, so it worked as far as finding an issue that I need to fix and we learned that we can ride over 1000 miles in two days.

[bonanzadave]

We pulled the plugs and I was running rich.

Open the airbox lid a bit. Probably easier said than done all loaded up like you were.

[7981GS]

I also was thinking of a quick temporary fix for these two.
As both of them run the factory airbox, the easiest thing to do would be to carry a set of (4) pod filters and switch the airbox to pods.
Or, possibly a better "tunable" option, if they both have a good factory rubber end cap seal,
They could remove the side cover that the filter pulls out of and duct tape the rubber seal in place to keep it from falling off?
If the side cover off trick allows too much air into the lower chamber, they could add sections of duct tape to the new opening until it was limited enough to run with the current jets?

The CV carbs are usually pretty forgiving when it comes to elevation changes but 5,000 feet variance seems to be about their limit.
The riders from Portland had a terrible time once they got above 6,000 feet here at the 2011 Western States Rally also.

Eric