V7Goose

First, it is IMPOSSIBLE for the AIS to have any affect whatsoever on the way your engine runs. Most new owners tend to try to ride these bikes like a V-twin, and they complain just like you do. The engine must be kept at higher RPMs if you are going to ask it for power. You cannot roll on the throttle hard in 5th gear at anything less than 65-70 MPH if you do not what it to shake and hammer. If you want to know what the bike can do, find an open stretch of road and nail the throttle in 2nd and 3rd gears until you feel the engine falter when it hits the rev limiter (in third, that will be about 96 MPH). It should take your breath away. In addition to lugging the engine, you most likely have a significant problem with your carburetors out of sync. Finally, it is certainly possible (but much less probable) that you have a dead cylinder. This engine will run much better than you might expect on just three cylinders - often the rider cannot even tell other than the fact that the top speed will be limited to around 85 or 90. Whatever it is, this problem is very easy to fix. Tell us where you live and you most likely will get somebody in the local area willing to help you out. Goose

You either have a clogged fuel filter or a kinked hose. My money is on an old fuel filter. Of course, anything that obstructs the fuel flow will cause identical symptoms, so if you do not have a fuel filter I'd suspect varnish and bits of dead things lodged in the float needle valves. Goose

If you took the calipers off, then you almost certainly have the ear of at least one pad hung up on the top rail. When this happens it gets bent back and the pad cannot slide on the rail to move up to the disc. Generally all will be fine if you simply bend the ear back flat and get them installed correctly. Goose

I hope so, 'cause someone needs to tell him he is gonna loose those antennas if he doesn't get those flags off of there! Lots of people here can tell him, they WILL break from small flags. Goose

Car tires handle very much like a worn out motorcycle tire that is flat across the center and has sharp edges instead of the normal rounded shape on the sides. The square corner will not roll smoothly over a ridge or other imperfection on the road surface. Instead, it grabs it and tries to "jump" over it, which is why you feel it so much. In actuality, the corner of the tread having a very quick roll-off instead of the long sweeping curve of a rounded motorcycle tire makes that edge function like a VERY THIN motorcycle tire that tries to turn over those ridges - that is what I meant by "jump" them. Most paint stripes on the road today are very thick and raised a bit above the surrounding surface. If you follow a bike with a CT on it and watch as they cross those paint stripes, you will see the rear end jiggle and jump as it tries to move very quickly over that edge. Goose

You need to let the bike sit long enough for some of the fuel to evaporate out of the carburetors before you will hear the fuel pump when you turn the key on. If you have had the engine on any time in the past day or so it should never make any noise because the carburetors should still be full and the line under pressure. It makes no difference how you stop the engine. If you want to check the pump easily, just run the engine for a minute or two with the fuel turned off. Then the next time you turn the key on you should hear the clicking. If you turned the fuel back on, then it will click long enough to fill the carbs, and you can hear it slowing down just before it stops. If you leave the fuel turned off, it will click longer, but eventually stop to prevent burnout. Goose

Bad idea Ponch. You already know how poorly made and dangerous the ME880 is in 150/90-15 size, and how Metzeler treats their customers. But even if you are willing to live with that, their 180/70-15 tire is spec'ed for a 5.00" rim, with a minimum rim size of 4.25". Our rim is 4.00". You might consider the Avon Venom 170/80-15 instead. It has almost the same maximum width (just 2 mm less) and even a slightly larger diameter (659 mm vs. 645 mm). And it is spec'd for a 4.00" rim. Goose

Just thought I should add these comments for troubleshooting this problem - not having much fuel in the carburetor float bowls, for any reason, can also cause these exact symptoms. Just something as simple as not turning on the gas - nobody has ever forgotten that, right? More likely than that would be a clogged fuel filter or bad fuel pump. The easiest way to make sure that fuel is flowing all the way to the carbs is to simply remove the fuel line from the carburetor intake above the right rear carb and turn the key on (don't forget the kill switch must be on too). If the fuel pump immediately kicks in and you have a decent fuel flow out of that gas line, then you are back looking at the pilot jets. You generally do need to pull the tank to get that fuel line off, so if you don't want to even go to that much trouble, just remove the left side battery cover and take off the output line from the fuel pump. This test is almost as good, since there is only about 1 foot of open fuel line between the fuel pump and the carb intake and there is almost no possibility that it is kinked.

Your problem is that windshield. It is 5" shorter than stock. I am 6'5", and I will not ride a bike where I must look through the windshield (I believe it is VERY dangerous in some situations). I tried one of those ShowChrome windshields and took it off after one day. For my body shape and seating position, I found that I had to remove about 1.5" from the stock windshield for a comfortable line of sight just over the top edge. Goose

Sorry I wasted my time bothering you - it won't happen again. Goose

Your use of Locktite was not a particularly good idea. Locktite destroys most plastics, including ABS. Long term damage can be expected. Goose

Two months is generally not enough to plug jets, but with modern gas it is possible. It is also quite possible that they were partially obstructed before it sat. The problem you describe fits this diagnosis 100%. The last guy I worked with whose bike behaved like that managed to get it running fairly well after running at least 5 full tanks of Seafoam treated gas through it, but even then we could still easily see the pilot jets partially clogged when we pulled the carbs. Took several hours of soaking them in straight carb cleaner and repeated shots of compressed air before I got them totally clean. The drain screws are reachable with a long 5mm allen wrench from between the carbs on each side - each one is kind of hidden behind the intake manifold. Of course you realize that adding anything to the tank does absolutely no good until your run the bike enough to replace the fuel already in the carbs with the new treated fuel. That is one of the benefits of draining the carbs, but even then you still have a lot of gas left in the fuel line and fuel filter. It generally takes five to ten minutes of running to burn all that gas - half that if you drain the carbs, but it will make a real mess of things unless you can reach in there and put a drain hose on the drain nipples! If you do not drain the carbs first, start with the fuel off and run it until it dies. Then I'd mix up a small amount of 50/50 gas/Seafoam and let the fuel pump suck that in by taking the hose off the tank. The bike won't run very good on that strong a mix, so you will know when it has gotten into the carbs. That is when I'd let it sot over night to let the stuff soften the varnish. Goose

Your pilot jets are plugged from sitting. My be easy to clean out with a heavy dose of Seafoam, especially since you cannot ride it for a while. You just need to make sure to get the carbs full of the high Seafoam mixture before you let it sit again. But it may be a bit of a problem, too. A fuel cleaner cannot clean any jet if it is totally blocked - the cleaner has to be able to flow through it to clean. But still worth a try. Good luck, Goose

Have it your way; there is obviously nothing I can tell you. I just hope that people who really need to understand these systems don't waste their time believing your ideas . . . You do not understand what you are talking about, neither are you very good at guessing who a layman. Goose

Many people, INCLUDING lots of dealers, have been surprised to find that they did not actually turn off the ignition. If left in ACC, it does drain the battery very quickly. Under normal situations and a good battery, it should handle two months without any problem at all. Even my six year old battery will still start the bike fine after six weeks (but the voltage is lower than it would be with a younger battery!). No way to say for sure if your bike might have a problem, but after an accident, anything could be happening. Goose

I am sorry, but you are wrong. In fact, what you describe is not even electrically possible, since the charging input wire must connect to the same post on the battery to which the bike load connects. Here are the facts about electricity: Voltage is the force that pushes the electrons through the wire; you can think of it like water pressure. Current is the actual flow of the electrons - how much flows is a factor of the pressure behind it and the resistance in front of it; this is similar to the water in a hose. The amount of water that comes out of a hose is controlled by BOTH the amount of pressure behind the water and the size of the opening at the end of the hose. If you connect a hose to two different pumps, the one with the highest pressure will push water through the hose and into the other pump, despite the fact that the lower-pressure pump is still trying to push water at the same time. The electrical system on a vehicle is essentially the same, with the battery and the charging system both being pumps, and the vehicle load connected between them. The pump pressure of the battery can never be more than 13 volts, and if it is even slightly discharged, it will be something less. The only way you can charge a battery is to connect an electrical source to it that is a HIGHER voltage than the fully charged battery; that is why the charging system operates around 14 volts. So when the engine is running, the charging system has more EMF (electromotive force, or "pressure") than the battery, so as long as the voltage from the charging system is greater than the actual voltage in the battery at any point in time, it is completely impossible for any current to flow OUT of the battery. If a sudden load is applied (like hitting an air horn), that will suck up all of the available current from the charging system, thus lowering the voltage from that "pump" and the battery will then be able to supply the rest of the needed current for this big load. But as soon as the load goes away and the voltage from the charging system goes back up, the current at the battery will reverse direction and flow back into the battery to bring it back up to full charge. The regulator in the charging system is simply designed to sense when the battery has reached full charge and lower the charging system output to only provide the total current needed by the vehicle. In this state, absolutely no current is either flowing IN or OUT of the battery. This is why an ammeter will always show 0 amps if the battery is fully charged and the charging system is still working. If it did not do this by lowering the output voltage to the point where the resistance of the battery was equal to the force from the charging system or limiting the available current (which effectively lowers the voltage), the battery would be constantly over charged and be ruined in short order. In a vehicle with a bad battery that can never reach full charge, an ammeter will ALWAYS show some positive reading because some current will constantly be flowing backward through the battery as if it was being charged. In the old days before sealed batteries, this resulted in rapid water loss from boiling, which further damaged the battery in quick order. With modern batteries, they can live in this status much longer before total failure, but they are still in the checkout lane. Goose BTW - just to add a little more info on charging systems - an alternator, such as most cars use, has electromagnets, so when the system needs less current, the regulator reduces the voltage to the electromagnets, thus reducing the output. Since this also reduces the magnetic resistance in the turning motor, the fuel mileage increases (by a small amount) when you use less electricity. On our system with permanent magnets and a stator, the stator windings always produce the maximum available current for any particular RPM, so the regulator must operate in a very different way to limit the voltage in the system. Instead of reducing the total generated power, our regulator just shunts all unneeded current to ground. In this type of system, total electrical usage can have zero impact on fuel mileage.

Seaking, I remember your situation well, and both shops involved had real problems in the mistakes they made in trying to solve it. From the beginning, we said the symptoms sounded like fuel starvation, but that first shop insisted they checked that. The result, as you said, was a huge waste of time an money for everyone. The bad information here is the absolutely WRONG idea that it takes more pressure to get fuel to the front carbs than the rear. Any mechanic that says such a stupid thing simply shows that they are just making up stories to try to fool an "dumb customer" instead of actually talking about something they know. The statement that gravity could feed the rear carbs but not the front could not be more wrong. The four carbs are mounted together with a single fuel input and two level fuel manifolds. Any fuel that enters the manifold (just a simple straight pipe) will drain equally into both carbs on that side of the bike. The manifold for the left two carbs is perhaps 1 inch further away from the fuel line than the right side manifold, but even that is not a reasonable cause for claiming that the left two carbs might run out sooner than the right two. But your idiot mechanic didn't even try to claim that; he just made up an asinine story about the front carbs vs. the rear carbs because he thought he could snow you with that. Finally, no plugs will ever be wet unless the problem is lack of spark or oil blow-by. If there is fuel and spark, the plug will be dry because the fire burns the fuel. The ONLY way a plug could ever be wet from anything is if there is no fire in the cylinder. I know you are just repeating what the fools told you, but I just didn't want anyone else to take this as gospel. Goose

No I assume you are asking if using Dielectric grease on the plug would have helped. I do not think so. In fact, I am a bit surprised that just checking the plug in the first place didn't solve the issue. Simply pulling a plug off and putting it back causes the pins to scrape the surface and improve the contact. Dielectric grease does nothing to help the contact, it only helps prevent future corrosion from creeping between the pin surfaces and causing problems then. It is possible that the problem got better for a while after I checked that plug the first time, but I did not notice that. If it did, then there is a possiblility that using DE grease at that time would have prevented it from coming back. Goose

Sorry Eck, I think you are wrong here. There are a number of points I'll hit, in no particular order . . . First, this bike runs very will on gravity feed for the fuel. But not usually with a dead fuel pump in the circuit (that means you are mostly right here). Although I have not done a lot of testing on this specific problem, the RSV will run great on gravity feed when a straight line is run from the tank to the carb input. In the stock configuration, if the fuel pump goes completely out, it usually dies. But I think there is a possibility that the pump can stop in some specific positions that might allow fuel to flow through it. This could be enough to generally let the engine run OK, especially if the bike is not being run hard. This engine will run several miles on just the fuel in the float bowls, so the fact that he shut off the gas 1 mile from home and it kept running is no surprise. But a full mile would probably have lowered the gas level in the carbs enough for the fuel pump to have had to come on (click) when he turned the key back on in the garage. A better test would be to just shut the fuel off and ride it until it falters, then shut it off and turn the key back on to listen for the pump. Finally, from various reports I have seen, it seams fairly common for the se fuel pumps to fail slowly, where the work sometimes and sometimes not. In these cases, it can be difficult to actually know when the pump is working. Goose

This information will seem like old hat to those of us who have been around these bikes a while, but what I will explain below is that knowing and understanding something it is NOT the same as grokking it! This may be a little long, but I'll do my best to keep it concise. If you have noticed voltage fluctuations on your bike, this thread's for you. The problem: For at least the last 20,000 miles I have had intermittent periods of low voltage on my 05, but only when running extra load like passing lamps. Occasionally the voltage while riding would drop down below 12, and at idle even below 11. But if I turned off the driving lamps it would jump all the way back to 13.8 - 14. I also noticed that when the voltage was low, often just a sudden increase in load such as a quick touch of the air horn or just flashing the high beams would cause the voltage readings to go back to normal. I have NOT had any problem with dead battery. Although my bike is close to 100,000 miles and has the original six year old battery in it, I also noticed this identical problem on the 07 I had for a few months. This was a clue that I ignored. Analysis: These are absolute classic symptoms for bad wire connections or pin contacts in plugs. Since the voltage was only low when the load was high, it indicated that excess current was being sucked from the battery instead of being supplied by the bike's charging system. The fact that it was not always low under those conditions proved that the charging system did have the full capacity, but it was not always being delivered to the battery. On the Royal Stars, the plug connecting the regulator/rectifier is a know problem with the pins for the main 12V and ground wires often overheating and melting the plug. The excess heat that melts the plug is caused by poor pin contact that works like a resistor. Long ago I pulled this plug and it looked perfect. I also pulled the plug for the three stator wires, and all looked good there too. Over the past year or two I have periodically checked just about all plugs and wires, including grounds and battery cables without finding any problems. This problem can also be caused by an old or defective battery that just sucks up too much charging current, so this knowledge coupled with the fact that I still have the original six year old battery in the bike made me assume that had to be the cause. I never did see an excess charge current flowing into the battery on the ammeter, but just assumed that was because the only ammeters that are available these days have a + - 60A swing, and that is just too much to accurately see current flow on a 30A max motorcycle. I was just waiting for the bike to show some slow cranking to buy a new battery and prove the point. The problem has been getting noticeably worse in the past few months. Still not having charging problems, but probably because I have been mostly leaving the driving and passing lights off. If I did not have full gauges and monitor them regularly, I probably would never even have a hint that there was a problem at all. If the battery had died two years ago, I would have just assumed it was normal old age for a motorcycle battery. Surprise easy fix: Well today I decided to pull the regulator/rectifier one more time to check that plug. It still looked perfect. Although this circuit seems to be designed on the absolute minimum of what is needed for the 30A current, the plug does have a very good rubber seal in it that keeps out the crud if the plug is properly seated, and even after close to 100,000 miles, mine still looked like new. But still, I took the time to plug/un-plug the thing about 10 times to scrape the pins good, then I took a pair of needle nose pliers to slightly tweak the pins for the big red and black wires - the idea here was to make them press harder on the fittings in the plug and guarantee good contact. Well guess what? When I took it out for several hours, even with fairly low battery voltage to begin with from sitting for several weeks, the system voltage NEVER DROPPED EVEN ONE TIME! This was an obvious fix that I should have done a couple of years ago, but the fact that my plug never showed any signs of heat problems fooled me into believing there must not be any problem with the pin contact there. WRONG. The moral here is that even when things look right, they may not be. Never hurts to go the extra distance to clean/re-seat/tighten something that you suspected in the first place. It sure won't make things worse, and it just might fix it! Goose

I've been involved in several of those - no idea if it was the same company. Money was always cash in hand when I finished the survey. Goose

The fit and function is identical. In 2005 they made one minor engineering change in a very weak attempt to stem the high failure rate: the new design includes a vent hose routed up next to the battery on the right side. Supposedly this hose was to keep the road grime out of the boot. In my experience it made no difference - my first shock failed around 17,000 miles. The good news is that the replacement has made it about 80,000 miles so far. Seems like the average life of even the new design is nothing more than a crap shoot. Goose

Just a minor point of terminology and function, but these plugs are purely DRAIN plugs for the water jackets, not freeze plugs. A freeze plug is a thin metal disk glued into a hole in the water jackets of an engine block. It's purpose is to rupture or pop out BEFORE the engine block can split open if the coolant actually does freeze. Since these rubber plugs are held in place by the fin covers, they can never function as freeze plugs, even if the coolant freezes solid. Most people call them freeze plugs just because that is what they are used to on a car engine. Like I said, this a very minor point, but it never hurts to fully understand the function of a part. Goose

Yes, just take out the three socket-head screws. Nothing else holds them in place. Might take you 1 whole minute to do (if you're real slow). Goose

Yes, that is a huge difference, but there are a number of things that can cause it. For a difference that big, the most likely is time without a GPS signal. There are three other main causes for distance discrepancies. First, the stock odometer is off by some % - it is not near as bad as the speedo, but still a bit optimistic - 1-3% typically. Second, the GPS will have a trip setting somewhere that determines when it actually starts adding distance and time to the trip memory. Typically you can specify how fast and how far the machine must move before the GPS should assume you are actually traveling again (instead of maybe just moving around in a parking lot). Default setting may not actually be recording distance unless you are moving over 5 miles per hour. The third cause is a bit harder to verify, but has to do with the frequency of position updates from the satellites. Position checks and distance calculations are not constant, but occur at discreet intervals, like pulses. The faster you travel, the more distance you will cover between each pulse. In a straight line, this makes no difference, but if you are in a sharp turn, the calculated distance will be a straight line between your actual position at each pulse, not the longer arc that you actually traveled. The difference may seem minuscule, but over many hours, days and miles all of those tiny differences can add up. Goose