mmaleney

Thanks for that luvmy40, one more thing to try.

I have a good harness and coils from a bike I ran for two years so I know they are good and that is easier for me to swap everything out rather than trying find bad coil's, pinched harness, corroded connectors or something that I am not sure what I would be even looking for. The weather has been very wet all summer here in PA, very moist and humid. Lots of mold everywhere. So it may be that is the cause of my two a week TCI loss. As always will let you know what I find. Thanks to all.

Did I miss your post regarding the first decision to change the TCI? Could you link it here please. Steve there was no other post on this subject. I was out riding and the bike started to act up after i checked a few things I tried a spare TCI and the bike immediately ran fine. Then that TCI went bad. Well guess I will not be out riding this fall or until I find something obvious.

Last week i was out on my 87 venture when the bike started to backfire and loose power, made it home OK and checking things out found the TCI was bad so put in a spare all good bike ran fine. About a day or so out on the bike again it started to run rough again not like before this time #2 cylinder went out,got home again OK, put in a old 83 mark TCI I had good enough to start the motor on, bike ran on all 4 cylinders again. I checked for voltage to see if that was high bike checked out at 14.2 at 3000 RPM. I don't want to put one more TCI in there and have it go out again so is there anything more I can check?. And I know that it may just be one of those things that two 30 year old TCI boxes went out in one week. But maybe not. Thanks.

So how would one go about measuring a cam retainer I did not see anything about that in the manual. The compression readings were #1 155 #2 175 #3 220 #4 172 I reshimmed #1 cylinder it came up to 170. The motor was cold. I think the cams are stock in that motor. When I say the buckets were tight what I meant was they would not spin free when the cam was off the shim so that is what I think was making the tap noise as opposed to a rod knock which I think I no longer have.

Well good news I think, I set up a tool to recheck for TDC and they all came out the same, then I did a check for compression, had to play around with the valves on one cylinder to bring it up to match the others that worked out fine. Thing is when I took of the valve cover there was a chip broken off of one cam retainer the thread that holds the valve cover on had split and nowhere in sight, so not sure what that means. I put on a new old retainer with some oil on it. So as I looked around to find what could be making a loud knock or tick I did find maybe 4 tight valve buckets as in I had to force them to move when the cam was off the shim. At this time I do not have a clean set of carbs to fire the motor so things may have to sit for a while. Thanks again all will let you know what I find when I get to fire it up.

I'll check compression again this weekend again will let you know what numbers I find. Thanks for all the help.

Thanks guys. I did have the motor running before and did not hear the knock. It was about a month ago and I did check compression at that time and that did not show one cylinder out more than the others. Then I tried to take a reading of the pistons at TDC but found that to hard to get a accurate reading. So I was hoping there was a way to check with the bottom engine plate off a way to measure piston to bottom of cylinder without having to remove the head, If for some reason I look up in to the motor and can not visually see anything bent/ broken. The kawasaki Concourse 1000 was notorious for bending rods on start up from gas leaking past the carbs, I always had to shut off the gas on mine.

Hi all. I was working on my 1987 projects testing a set of carbs I was working on and had it set up with a gravity feed, it looks like a float needle let gas into a cylinder, I hit the starter and the motor locked would not turn over I then pulled the spark plugs out and one cylinder was full of gas, I got the motor running again later but that was when i heard the knock sound. So anyone ever swap a rod on a venture. ? Any thing I should know before I start ? I have a spare rod from the same year bike so that should work its the bearing that will have to be checked for size I was thinking I could reuse the old bearing if it was the right size or is that not a good idea. I was going to reuse the piston and rings, will I have to hone the cylinder ? Thanks all.

Max lives. Over the last number of years I have built two trikes from the venture like the type you want to build so if you want any info or a photo of what kind of trike I now ride I would be glade to help. Good luck, Mike.

Its just amazing to read about the damage sugar can do and when you get to the part about the parasites, that is when the hair stands up on the back of you're neck.

There is a guy on you tube called Butter Bob real good info. His thing is that we should eat more fat to lose weight, sounds crazy but it works, It worked for me. Hope it works for you.

If I ever get round to pulling the old set apart I will let you all know what I find. the only thing I saw was the set were made by someone called Frank.

I decided to go with a known rather than an unknown so i rebuilt a set i had, new oil seal, new oil. Perfect. Thanks to all. Mike.

And when I say it is stiff, it is stiff in both direction compression and dampening.