Diagnosing running on one cylinder

[pherthyl]

Hi all,

Well my bike has been running on only the right cylinder lately, and I've been trying to diagnose why.  So first I pulled the plugs, the left one was completely carbon fouled, while the right looked perfect.  So I checked the float height, and the left one was about 3mm higher than the gasket, while the right one was dead on. 
So this leads me to believe that the high float height is causing the left cylinder to run rich and thus foul up and stop working.  Is that more or less accurate?  So I assume that the next step to try is to take the carbs out and adjust the float height on the left side.
The only problem is that I've never done anything that complicated before, and before I dive in, I'd like to know if there is anything simpler that I should try before I do this.  Any suggestions?  Before I bought this bike the most complicated thing I worked on was my bicycle, so I'm always a bit nervous when working on it.  So far the farthest I've gotten is to take the tank off (which revealed that someone had mounted the tank petcock the wrong way around, which didn't make turning it off very easy).   I have the clymer manual though, so I suppose I could probably figure it out.

Edit:  I should add that when I clean the left plug with a toothbrush, or put new ones in, the bike runs great for a while.

[starwalt]

Could be....

I remember a thread a while back on setting the float hieght while on the bike.

Was it Kerry or Srinath that talked about it?  All you really do is bend a metal tab to set it.

What year and how many miles on your GS?

[pherthyl]

Thanks for the reply.

Could be....

I remember a thread a while back on setting the float hight while on the bike.

Was it Kerry or Srinath that talked about it.  All you really do is bend a metal tab to set it.

Yeah I remember reading that as well.  Maybe I'll try that first.  I don't really want to be without a working bike while it's still nice out.  I'm guessing they could probably use a proper cleaning though (I've never taken them apart, and I suspect they haven't been opened for a long time).

What year and how many miles on your GS?

It's an '89 with 33,000km (~21,000 miles) on it.  Just bought it a couple months ago.