Cleaning the Carbs

I used to have an old Post Office van which I purchased for delivering wine back in the 80s. Without having much knowledge of motors I remember removing and dismantling the carburettors and cleaning them out in a bucket of hot soapy water. Amazingly the car went much better afterwards!

I have since dismantled and cleaned the Mikuni carbs on my Yamaha XS650, though have moved on from soapy water to proper carb cleaner.

The Norton wasn't ticking over very well, the air filter looked manky and the air-intake rubber boots were shot, so I watched a few Youtube videos and leapt in. Once dismantled I noticed one of the spray tubes was loose. The advice was simply to set it back in with some Loctite.

It's quite a fiddly job getting the air filter out and the manifold off. A chopped down 5.5mm Allen key is required, with very little wiggle room. Getting them back on with the new rubber boots is probably even worse.

While they were off I decided to get them vapour-blasted:

I did have to grind down the flange of the bowl and a bit of the top flange to get them flat. Put them together with new gaskets, mounted them with petrol tank, turned on the taps.... and petrol was pissing through all gaskets!

Took everything apart again, ground the flat joints again, quite a lot, purchased new gaskets directly from Norton this time, and now they don't leak. Though I did come back a day later to a puddle of petrol as I had not tightened one of the drain plugs enough.

The slides are quite marked but I can't afford €600 for new Amal Premiums right now. Well, I can, but don't want to.

The bike started easily, sounded good, but as soon as I was on the street it was playing up and only firing on one cylinder. Sure enough the left cylinder was cold and no spark firing. Replaced the spark plugs and went for a ride around the ring.

After having been away for a week I came back to see a puddle of gearbox oil under the bike. It is leaking out of the kickstart spindle...

In the meantime I am officially "zugelassen":