L
luvmy40
Guest
I picked this bike up to be my weekend trip, 2up comfort ride. It started easily and idled smooth but has a slight intermittent hesitation at highway speeds.
I picked up a GK hard bag kit and Kuryakyn ISO grips and highway bars on fleabay. It had a SlipStreamer windshield with it uninstalled. You can see the side bags and wind screen in the back ground. I also bought a double bucket saddle kit from Saddlemen to redo the stock seat which wasn't in bad cosmetic shape but the foam was broke down badly. The seat pan and cover kit are at a local aftermarket shop for installation as the new cover was not cut and grommeted for the seat lock.
I Replaced the clutch friction plates and springs, and did some minor mill work on the large clutch hub spacer to tighten things up in there as it has a bit of rattle. I considered getting the backing plate rebuilt but thought that it was a bit expensive and not really needed for this bike as it will be an easy riding touring bike rather than a hard ridden racer.
I'm waiting on one last valve shim to complete the valve clearance adjustments. There was little to no clearance at all on five valves and it took a couple times swapping and measuring to get everything right at .08mm clearance.
The PO supposedly had the carbs cleaned last year and judging by the way it ran, he may actually have been telling the truth. They are very clean externally, but I have an o-ring kit and float bowl gaskets so I will open them up to take a closer look in a few days. I also have new air box boots, manifold boots and o-rings for reassembly.
I am going to disassemble the tank tomorrow to get the fuel level sending unit/float working correctly again and clean it up with Evaporust for reassembly with a new petcock. Are there any higher capacity GS tanks that will go on this model without major modification?
Now the real fun. The speedo and tach. are inop. The tach cable is good and spinning but the tach moves slowly and hangs up. The speedo has the trip reset dial broken off and the cable is not being turned by the drive gear. I need to pull the front wheel to see if it is repairable or if I will need to replace the speedo drive assy.
I bought a set of gauges from a member here. They are from an '82 GS1100. They looked to be identical in mounting though configured differently so I took a chance that I would be able to make them work for me as I was having trouble finding the exact gauges for the bike.
The "new" gauges are electrically identical but the indicators are placed differently which makes the connections different. Really not a big deal. I took the connectors apart and will be able to reconfigure most of them and only have to make new connectors for 3 wires. The real fun was when I realized that the mounting hardware, though similar is different enough that it will not just bolt on. Then I find that the dial gauge mounting studs have different placement themselves and cannot be used without modifying my original mounting bracket. This was not too difficult to do though, so I finally got a good mountable replacement unit ready to install when I find that the wires are all a couple inches shorter than the original configuration so I have punch a new hole and find a grommet for the headlight bucket!
Why can't it ever be simple?
I hope to have everything done and put back together in a couple of weeks.
Thus ends this chapter of my novel!
