20th March 2006

One day after our first anniversary together, I pull her apart again! (Will she ever forgive me?)

For some months now she has been on and off running rough, to the point where I have had to stop riding and start fixing.

I have replaced the plugs, replaced the fuel filter, replaced the spark plug leads, cleaned all the electrical connections I possibly can, changed the battery (its intermittent and hard to tell if its fuel or electrical) and a bunch of other things. Someone on the Goldwing forum I hang out a little on suggested it might be the advance and or the vacuum actuator for it. The only way to get to it and check it properly is to remove the motor or remove the fuel tank. I wanted to check the tank properly, so I chose this route. As it happens, I chose right (Even though at the time of writing this, I don't know if the problem is fixed, but check out the photos!)

Before I replaced the plugs, this is what they looked like? Why are they red? Duno, I hope you can tell me, drop me a line, beno.id.au at gmail.com. To get the fuel tank out, remove the seat, may as well pull the 3 panniers off first....

Take a look in the tank from time to time, you might see something scary (like I did), or it might look good, either way you will know a bit more about your bike, not a bad thing. Go ahead and pull the dummy tank off, and pull the battery and battery box out.

Pull the back mud guard off, pull the back wheel off by removing it with the final drive. Then unbolt the rear brake master cylinder and drop off the rear brake lever from the cylinder by removing the pin. Remove the fuel tap (yes, it really is that much of a close fit!).

Ok, just juggle it around till you have it out. Its not easy to do, I had to also drop off the rear disk brake arm to get it out. If your swing arm can clear your exhaust, you may not have to do this, but the point is, you have gone this far, don't give up, its gota come out. Why gota, well, just take a look at what was in the bottom!

Yeah! Now, that's just gota do great things for the smooth running of the bike, honestly, I don't know why all bikes don't come with it as a standard accessory! eeeerrrrryyyyuuuuuccckkkkkk, yeah, enough jokes aside, some of it is the last 4 or so inches of the reserve pick up tube. The rest of it, well, lets just say, the tank is a little thinner than when it was new. Of course, seeing this, and even though there has been a fuel filter fitted, I just had to pull the carbies, and in the bottom of all 4 bowels, was this muck. Let the record show that I had drained all 4 bowls about a week before in trying to solve the problem, only a little red came out, so clearly just undoing the screw in the bottom of the bowl does not clean the gunk out, it just drains the bowl.

20th March 2006

Well, she (wish 'she' would tell me her name!) is back together (mostly). I went for a ride yesterday with Terry, just out and about and of course I rode to work today. Its really hard to explain, but its a different bike, its like we changed the motor over. Its WAY quieter, I mean way, way, WAY quieter, wind noise is more noticeable than motor noise now, and there is NO vibration in the foot pegs or handle bars any more. There never was any, but now what was there is totally gone, its noticeable just how much was there.

Here are the final sequence of photos.

At some stage, some one had routed the push pull throttle cables under this cross member. It caused a lot of friction on the cables and thus the throttle never really snapped shut the whole time I have owned the thing. Its been on my to do list for a while, and while the tank and carbies were out, now was the time to do it. Sadly, I ordered new cables before I realized that you could buy just the inner and ends and make up your own new inner cable. Never mind, the cables had worn though the plastic inner and were rubbing on the steel coil, so they need replacing at some stage. 80 bucks for the new cable set (on back order for 4 weeks and counting) and 6 bucks for the inner parts. I will put the new cables on at some stage in the future, for now, I have replaced the iners and routed the cables over the cross member. The throttle control now is amazing, slick.

Look, No carbies! Its not that hard to get them out once you are this far into it....

On the left we have the stuff I used to knock the 'last' of the rust off the tank walls and the rust that came out. In the middle is the main tank pickup. On the left we have the reserve pick up tube and where the rest of the tube is supposed to go (down through the clamp and around the corner of the tank!). Im pleased to say that the missing length really does not make me 'miss' out on any fuel. It still sucks the full 20 liters out of the tank.

Here is the poor old girl, this is about as striped as she got. But it was all worth it. Loads of super smooth miles aft she went back together.

some month in 2006........
Always wanting to go further, and further into the back roads at obscure times, I finallly did what mother Honda should have done.....put a realistic sized fuel tank on the bike........
Because of my past adventures into the orignal 20L tank, I knew I would not be able to tweak that, so I added another, 'long range tank' in the right hand panier.

Ten point 5 liters and I have never had a single regret. I now have a range of 470kms. Yeah!

There is fuel tap on the right hand side of the frame, sorry, no photo. The deal is, you have the main tank tap turned off and the LRT turned on. This drains the LRT, getting 170kms. When its dry, switch the tap off and the main tank on. You really need to make sure that you keep the main tank switched off, other wise its possible to drain some of the fuel from the main tank to the LRT, if its full, things could get ugly.