I mean, freakin' HONESTLY, who the hell puts a vacuum line in the most in-ac-f%$king-cessible place in the world?

So I'm performing my 7500 mile service and I finish replacing my spark plugs. Onto syncing the carbs! I realize I should have done this twice now, as I've rejetted it twice, but whatever. So after looking in the Clymer's manual I see the vacuum lines are nice and conveniently placed on top of the carbs for easy access. That's a good idea.

Oh wait. Crap. That's for the OLD model carbs. My new model carbs are crap crap crap! The right carb's vacuum line is easy to get to, so that wasn't an issue. The left carb, however, is proof of sadism at work. This thing is located on the INSIDE BOTTOM of the goddamn carb. What the hell? I can't get down there with my hand because there isn't room, and even when I tried I burned my hand on the engine! Hell, that rubber cap was hard to get off with needlenose! And to top it off, when I finally DID manage to get it off, it was TORN! To get this thing off I had to use HUGE needlenose with a 90* bend at the end to be able to grab at this cap. It was still tough because it is angled AWAY from the direction which you can grab it from and there's no room to work anyways.

After we broke the cap getting it off, another fun part was trying to get the hose to the guages onto the vacuum line. Again, it's not like we had any room to work, so we had to jst push it on and hope it stayed. After all this effort to deal with the goddamned vacuum line, what do I find out? My carbs are perfectly synced. Yeah, I guess I could be relieved that I don't have to do any MORE work, but still... damn.

Whosever idea it was to put the left vacuum line where it is now needs to be taken out back and shot.

Quote from: AlphaFire X5Whosever idea it was to put the left vacuum line where it is now needs to be taken out back and shot.

A far better fate would be forcing them to perform the same task you did a thousand times. After they got back to their engineering job, they would make the design better.

Or it could be that they never intended the wrencher to sync this way. Makes me wonder, again, if EFI is on the GS horizon. If the parts count/cost was comparable, why not EFI? If the space on the bike allows a good integration, why not EFI?

I work on medical imaging systems for a living. I've been in the same frame of mind on mulitple occassions when a silly engineer put something I had to adjust or change in a stupid location. Usually they get promoted to a management position eventually and it removes their influence from the design gene pool.  :lol:

it allways works on paper,what kind of engineer's are they if they cant even run a train.  see ya.

See what I mean? That's the view as if you're sitting on the bike. It's really down there! It took me a while to get a shot where you could actually see it, too. I had to take the picture at an angle facing back towards the vacuum port because you can't see it when you look directly down on it.

If you can see it you should be able to get to it.  :guns:

That's my design philosophy :mrgreen:

By the way, I'm an engineer. :lol:

Synch ... why didn't you synch it when you had them off ... eyeball synch baby ... far more accurate than vacuum and if you eyeball synch and it still is crap ... that points to a different issue ...
Cool.
Srinath.

How in the hell is an eyeball synch better than synching the carbs with accurate guages??

Well ... The vacuum synch takes into account the engine vacuum instead of just the carbs ... say one cylinder has more compression than the other ... you will end up having higher vacuum in it and hence setting it to a more closed butterfly ... when you run it at low speed it will feel smooth but at higher speed it will be far too buzzy. With a eyeball synch, it may vibe more at the 2500 and under mark but at higher speed it will smooth out. The higher vacuum/compression will affect mainly at lower rpm unless its so bad that it afftects the running of it at all rpm's. My 89 at idle would shake so bad ... heck you start it and as its warming up its tail will literally shake like a pole dancer at a nudie bar ... Get on it and start riding it and it will immediately run buttery smooth ... anything over 2500 it was buttery smooth ... like a pole dancer and a nudie bar ...  :lol:  ... that bike usually read a couple psi off in 1 cyl vs the other. The other fact is ... the vacuum for the petcock eats up a bit of your engine vacuum and you'd have to cap it off before doing vacuum synch. The bike is usually faaar more sensitive to carb anamolies than motor anamolies ... surprising but true.
Cool.
Srinath.