May as well start one of these.
Needed something for the DGR this year, so spent a few days trawling ebay for bargains and found this. Won it in an ebay auction for £2200. It was located in Exeter, 160 miles away from home. Caught a train last Monday, the seller picked my wife and I up from the station and we did all the paperwork and stuff at his house. Rode it halfway home, by this time it was getting late, it was miserable, wet, rainy and cold. So we booked a hotel and stayed the night at what turned out to be a lovely little inn, before completing the journey home the next day.
It's a 1999 model, with 18k miles on the clock, and a massive folder of paperwork and even a Haynes manual. New tyres, loads of service history, generally in pretty good nick. It's got an aftermarket exhaust, air filter and some other tat that I'm not keen on so it'll need some restoring.
Today the bike came out the garage for the first time since I got it home, and it fired up just fine. It runs out of puff very early, it backfires, and runs fairly poorly, so tweaking is needed, more on this shortly.
Took it out for some photos so I can log what's happening to it over time:
Firstly, the bike runs far too lean at higher throttle and simply won't accelerate. The air cleaner looked quite sus and there are some flaps on it which look like they're meant to open and shut, but they're stuck at full open. Turns out this pile of junk is a rather expensive gimmick called a Kurakyn Hypercharger:
The fact that it's stuck at 100% is a huge contributing factor to it running lean, so I need to bin it and find an original air cleaner. It also lets the paper filter suck in all the crap it can, and when sticking a torch in the thing the paper filter is absolutely filthy.
I also need to remove all the Village People leather crap, the handguards which are the crappiest thing I've ever seen screwed to a bike ever, the pannier bags and brackets, and order some trims to go over the holes in the mudguard. I need to leave the sissy backrest on as my wife likes it, but we'll see how often she goes on the back.
I'll update as things progress, stay tuned.
Needed something for the DGR this year, so spent a few days trawling ebay for bargains and found this. Won it in an ebay auction for £2200. It was located in Exeter, 160 miles away from home. Caught a train last Monday, the seller picked my wife and I up from the station and we did all the paperwork and stuff at his house. Rode it halfway home, by this time it was getting late, it was miserable, wet, rainy and cold. So we booked a hotel and stayed the night at what turned out to be a lovely little inn, before completing the journey home the next day.
It's a 1999 model, with 18k miles on the clock, and a massive folder of paperwork and even a Haynes manual. New tyres, loads of service history, generally in pretty good nick. It's got an aftermarket exhaust, air filter and some other tat that I'm not keen on so it'll need some restoring.
Today the bike came out the garage for the first time since I got it home, and it fired up just fine. It runs out of puff very early, it backfires, and runs fairly poorly, so tweaking is needed, more on this shortly.
Took it out for some photos so I can log what's happening to it over time:
Firstly, the bike runs far too lean at higher throttle and simply won't accelerate. The air cleaner looked quite sus and there are some flaps on it which look like they're meant to open and shut, but they're stuck at full open. Turns out this pile of junk is a rather expensive gimmick called a Kurakyn Hypercharger:
The fact that it's stuck at 100% is a huge contributing factor to it running lean, so I need to bin it and find an original air cleaner. It also lets the paper filter suck in all the crap it can, and when sticking a torch in the thing the paper filter is absolutely filthy.
I also need to remove all the Village People leather crap, the handguards which are the crappiest thing I've ever seen screwed to a bike ever, the pannier bags and brackets, and order some trims to go over the holes in the mudguard. I need to leave the sissy backrest on as my wife likes it, but we'll see how often she goes on the back.
I'll update as things progress, stay tuned.