My 1982 GS 450 - journal thread

[Bammer07]

i took the carbs back apart tonight. i don't have the right snap ring pliers to get the needles out.

i realized that the needles are significantly different lengths. they are about 1/8" different or a little more. one of them is looser than the other. I think they were worked on and put back together wrong, at least one was. it wouldn't be the first carb part i've found put together wrong. the longer one seems more correct. i'll get the correct snap ring pliers tomorrow and figure it out.

Hey Bren, I'm a total noob with an '82 gs650gl and I have very similar looking plugs, the white smoke on the left tail pipe, and a cold exhaust pipe on cylinder 2. I've looked at the carb cleaning article, and put my carb through a cleaning, but I'm curious if I have the needle issue yours did. Did you take photos by chance that would show what an ill fitting needle looks like or how you would measure it? Are you measuring the height from the bottom of the slide? Might be a dumb question, but it's one of many I have about this bike! I'd love to get all 4 cylinders working properly.

[bren]

Hey Bren, I'm a total noob with an '82 gs650gl and I have very similar looking plugs, the white smoke on the left tail pipe, and a cold exhaust pipe on cylinder 2. I've looked at the carb cleaning article, and put my carb through a cleaning, but I'm curious if I have the needle issue yours did. Did you take photos by chance that would show what an ill fitting needle looks like or how you would measure it? Are you measuring the height from the bottom of the slide? Might be a dumb question, but it's one of many I have about this bike! I'd love to get all 4 cylinders working properly.

well in my case it didn't turn out to be related to the needle, it turned out to be wrongly adjusted idle jet metering screws. I had to turn them out a lot further than common wisdom would recommend (it was running very lean at the recommended 2 ish turns out and needed a couple more turns out on each carb to richen it up enough. It's currently set at around 5 turns out on each carb.) I didn't realize what a delicate balance that it is, between syncing the carbs, setting the idle throttle screw, and setting the idle fuel circuit. What I found was that because so little fuel was getting into the idle circuit, I had to prop the butterflies open a good bit more than the carbs liked for it to even idle at all, causing it to run weird. when I cranked open the idle jets, i found I could close the butterflies almost completely, and suddenly it would idle just fine.

the needle doesn't have any effect at idle. if you have one cylinder down, i'd check some other stuff first, check spark, check that the idle jet and related passages on that carb are very clean, check sync, check idle metering screw. if your jet needle was assembled wrong, you'd see it with the bowls off. the needle on my one carb that was assembled wrong was several mm shorter than the other, and you could tell just by looking. when I took the slides out, I found that the c clip that holds the needle into the slide wasn't seated all the way into its groove.

[Bammer07]

well in my case it didn't turn out to be related to the needle, it turned out to be wrongly adjusted idle jet metering screws. I had to turn them out a lot further than common wisdom would recommend (it was running very lean at the recommended 2 ish turns out and needed a couple more turns out on each carb to richen it up enough. It's currently set at around 5 turns out on each carb.) I didn't realize what a delicate balance that it is, between syncing the carbs, setting the idle throttle screw, and setting the idle fuel circuit. What I found was that because so little fuel was getting into the idle circuit, I had to prop the butterflies open a good bit more than the carbs liked for it to even idle at all, causing it to run weird. when I cranked open the idle jets, i found I could close the butterflies almost completely, and suddenly it would idle just fine.

the needle doesn't have any effect at idle. if you have one cylinder down, i'd check some other stuff first, check spark, check that the idle jet and related passages on that carb are very clean, check sync, check idle metering screw. if your jet needle was assembled wrong, you'd see it with the bowls off. the needle on my one carb that was assembled wrong was several mm shorter than the other, and you could tell just by looking. when I took the slides out, I found that the c clip that holds the needle into the slide wasn't seated all the way into its groove.

I'll make sure I check that all out, thank you! My plugs are all totally black and looking like they run very rich, so I wouldn't have thought to go nearly as far out with my adjustment screws (I'm at 1.5 turns due to the carbon fouling). This will be a tremendous help having your troubleshooting list!

[bren]

updates. there's always some little thing to mess around with (and throw 30 bucks at here or there...)

the new headlight bucket is not very good. something's loose in there and it buzzes horribly. and i think the vibration of it keeps killing every led bulb i try. they could just be self destructing because they're cheap though. i took the new headlight bucket apart and found that i can swap the glass and the reflector into the stock bucket, so i'm gonna put that back on. Which is fortunate because the way the replacement bucket is put together, i don't think i could reassemble it if i tried. it was just some weird metal clips holding it all in via spring tension. i've got yet another brand of bulb to try in my quest for a low power reliable led headlight bulb.

i put some fog lights on my crash bars, but found that they used way too much power, which is too bad because they're super bright which is awesome at night! But they killed my battery, which limped along for several weeks, but finally left me stranded after having lunch the other day, thankfully bump starting worked and i got home. i have another set of smaller fog lights to try that are about half the wattage. i hope that if i keep the lights at around 60 watts when they're at full blast that the battery will still charge at least a little. i did get a volt meter for my dash so i can monitor the battery while riding. i only need the fog lights when it's dark, so my fingers are crossed that the bike can handle it when at speed. i can flip them off at stop lights. If that fails, I guess I'll just get a super bright headlight and save the fog lights for my next bike which i'll be keeping an eye out for a 4 cyl GS or an sv650.. someday...

the rest of the lights have been swapped to led's and all work fine. the wattage savings here is a bit pitiful, but every bit probably helps.

part of the charging problem is the dyna ignition. i found out that it uses about double the power of the stock ignition, since the stock one only lights up one coil at a time, whereas the dyna keeps them both charged. the dyna uses 4 or 5 amps just for the ignition. that only leaves another 5 or so amps for the lights and the battery charging ...

i finally got around to rebuilding the cam chain tensioner. i thought the buzzing was coming from inside of the engine, thankfully it was not. either way - the oil leak was getting pretty annoying.

the only major thing left is the mufflers that are rusting out. there's a big hole in the bottoms of them now which would explain why i had such a hard time tuning the carbs - the baffles have huge holes rusted through them which i can now see through the holes that have formed in the mufflers themselves. not sure what i'm gonna do about that yet, but it runs fine so i'm gonna save that for a winter project, along with that one bolt in the valve cover that needs drilling out. i'm scared to take the exhaust off because i'm afraid that an exhaust bolt is gonna break off. so i might as well combine all of that and do it all at once over winter.

closing in on 2k miles that i've put on the bike so far i'm getting better at general riding, at least while underway, the stuff like rev matching which takes practice. starting to get more flow while riding. I need to catch up on parking lot stuff, u turns and emergency braking and things like that. it's just hard to want to go slow around a parking lot when it's so dang hot out.

that's it for now

[bren]

ignorance is bliss

Now that I have a voltmeter on my dash, I can see that there's a problem. Before, I just hoped/assumed that it was fine since it seemed to be starting and running fine for months, until I overtaxed the battery with the aux lights.

I got a new battery and charged it up, then went for a ride... the voltage never got above 13 and stayed around 12.8 or 12.9. So I guess I'll be going through the stator papers after all. I'm running an sh775 already, which I'd imagine is probably not the issue. Since I got the bike with a dead battery - a weak stator would be a pretty safe bet. It may be 40 years old for all I know. The wiring certainly is. I guess it's possible for it to work just good enough to run fine for a while and slowly kill the battery if not put on a tender after every ride. Sigh... I guess that's my next project on this thing.