After the restoration: 18,000 Mile Service

Several weeks ago, on the way back from Darryl’s Surf City Tech Day the right hand muffler came off of the bike. The sad thing is that although I knew something had happened, I wasn’t exactly sure what until maybe 20 miles later. I re-rode the route the next day, but didn’t see anything shiny along the road. Ok. I ordered a replacement.

Notice something different? Among the choices for replacement mufflers were seam and no seam. When I read that I was picturing a seam the length of the muffler which mine didn’t have so ordered the no seam version. Ooops. What to do. I liked the look of the no seam so ordered a replacement for the left side, too. It arrived about an hour after taking this picture.

I installed the left muffler that matches the right this afternoon. The muffler that was on the bike is now clean, polished, waxed, and put away in the same wrapping and box that contained the new muffler. Not quite sure what I’ll do with it. It does look better when both sides match.

When I pulled into the garage after riding home from Vasona Park I noticed a metalic tapping that sounded like it was coming from the front of the bike. I pulled the cover and didn’t see or feel anything obviously wrong.

I went over 18,000 miles going to breakfast this weekend. That means it’s time to start the service. This service is more than a simple oil change. I’m using the 3600-mile column from my service schedule checklist (PDF) that I created to make sure I don’t forget anything.

I took the battery out of the bike to check the levels. It is very hard to see through the dark case, so I popped the caps off the cell and was initially shocked to see the fluid level so low. Then I looked at the front of the case and noticed that when filled to the upper mark the level will still be down quite a ways from the caps. I topped off the cells and put the battery on the charger.

I oiled the brake and clutch linkages as well as the rear fender hinge. Cables look and feel good. Both wheels were given a good shake… no movement detected. The rear swing-arm doesn’t have any side-to-side play and the gap looks even on both sides. Finally I checked the cylinder base nuts. They were still nice and tight. That’s pretty much it for today.

As I was cleaning up and putting stuff away I noticed that the charger is telling me the battery is fully charged. It was on the charger less than an hour. That is indirect evidence that the battery and my charging system are working well.

Today I took the carbs off the bike for cleaning. I started with the right carb (working on only one carb at a time). All the jets were removed, sprayed with carb cleaner, and blown dry with compressed air. A loupe shows the various orifices to be clear.

I used a parallel to check the flatness of the carb mounting flange. It’s hard to tell looking at the picture, but when the parallel was held to the flange and held up to a light source it was quite obvious that the flange was not flat. A couple minutes of figure eights on extra fine sand paper fixed that.

I put the right carb back on the bike and did the same cleaning and checking on the left carb. It was in roughly the same shape as the right carb, including the slight bit of mounting flange warpage. I also noticed that next time I take the float bowl top off I’ll need a new gasket.

My final job this day was removing the bottom of the fuel petcock and checking the in-line filter. It was clean. I put the petcock back together and re-connected fuel lines. I also reconnected the air intake pipe and put the air filter back on the bike after cleaning the filter housing. Maybe tomorrow I’ll work on valves.

Today I started by moving the GS and putting the R69S in the condor wheel stand so I could have easy access to the side stand and center stand pivots for lubrication.

There wasn’t much sludge on the magnetic drain plug (sorry for the blurry image) but I did find two slivers of metal. That will bear watching. The oil was dark, but I know that in itself doesn’t mean much. I’d need to send it off for analysis if I wanted to know more.
I’m not that interested.

The plugs on both side measured .7 mm. I adjusted the gaps closer to the recommended .6 mm. On the left side I didn’t check the valve lash until after retorquing the heads. Both were slightly tight at .005” intake and .007” exhaust. I set them to the recommended values.

I had a bit of front end wobble. I adjusted the bearing pre-load a while back, but it didn’t seem to hold. I put the bike on the scissor jack to get the front end off of the ground so I can check it again.

After re-connecting the battery ground I checked the lights and the horn. They work. I also checked all fasteners. When looking at the front pinch bolt I notices rust on the front axle. It was re-chromed 10 years ago. It may be re-chromed again sometime in the future.

The bike started on the second kick. After a slight warm-up I clipped the timing light onto the spark lead and saw that the timing was advanced a bit. It only took two tries adjusting the points to get the idle at the S mark. At RPM the advance was going past the F mark. I adjusted the stop screw (it had been backed off earlier) until all was well.

The bike is ready for a test ride to get it up to operating temperature and then some final carb tweaking. I’ll try to get that done tomorrow so the bike will be ready to ride this weekend. Even without carb tweaking I can tell that it is idling smoother that it was before the service. It sounds better, too – but that might be my imagination!

After a 12-13 mile test ride I hooked up the carbtune for the final adjustments of the service. The bike didn’t feel bad, so this was more to check things out than to make any drastic changes.

I am terrible at carb adjustments, but think I got the idle air a bit better than it was. The idle balance was off slightly; it is fixed. The off idle balance was fine, so I left the cable adjustments alone.