Phour days to phantastic - fighting the small things (aka. day six)

Even though we managed to get the old girl rolling in (sort of) four days, as usual the tricky part starts once the old girl is on the road, as that's where all the "small" niggles rear their ugly heads.

So the first rideout didn't go very (it didn't have to), but it revealed a rather nasty tendency to not rev past 3000rpm and then once you pulled through, rev straight past red-line.

Also the new M14x1.5 petcock was leaking like a sieve, whilst simultaneously clogging up with rust debris from the tank - sort of Schrödinger's petcock. So I had to make an adapter to fit one of my preferred Guzzi M16x1 petcocks instead.

A bit of poking the wiring of the alternator with a stick (i.e. a multimeter) revealed that it wasn't a jetting issue or at least not alone, but that one of the coils had burnt out and as such an Ignitech was needed as this one only used the stock ignition trigger but not the coils to actually produce the spark.

This went rather well until it started to develop a weird running issue on one side, with it cutting out in the midrange. Initially I assumed this would be down to a clogged filter or the like and I started cleaning the carb like it was going out of style, including taking the tops off and finding out that the slides and cases are paired and they worked nice, when fitted in the correct bores.

And then this cheeky fellow smiled at me, chilling out in the float bowl instead of staying put, where he should have been. Also right next to it, the little rubber bung that is supposed to block the idle circuit was also found down there.  

A bit of shrink-wrap to the rescue and it now sits firmly in its place resulting in a decent idle.

Also I found out, you can actually leave the cables installed and slide the whole carb assembly out to one side to work on it. 

If you scroll back up, you'll notice that this filter looks distinctively different as it is a clear filter now. Yup, after 20km or so the first one had clogged up really, really badly, but at least now most of the rust is out of the tank. (Yes, I deliberately ran the petcock with no screen to do just that!)

... and this is the reward for all my efforts (ignore the temp gauge, that's still f*cked):

Yup, revs cleanly past the red-line. May need a bit more fine-tuning at around 3000rpm as it slightly hangs there, but boy... she is fast... for a CX500 that is.