Mech

The old exhaust is probably full of burnt up oil crud. caustic soda softens it and then a bash or ten loosens it and a hose gets a lot out. Or, if you have oxy-acetylene, and like to annoy the neighbors you can burn it out most spectacularly by putting a flame to the front end till it's starting to glow a bit of carbon, then turn the acetylene off. It turns into a rocket.. With a lot of smoke. It makes the pipe red hot though and pretty much either burns it out right then or rusts it out withing a few months.. But it is fun. It even sounds like a rocket..

Ok good work. Pity you had to pull the whole thing to find it though..

I had to take my last set of tyres to the shop to get them to seat them on the rims. I can break beads and get any tyre off (up to tractor ), and back on with just my six inch tyre lever I made for my bike tool kit fifty years ago. That's just a matter of technique. But the last set of tyres were too narrow to touch the rims and no matter what tricks I tried I could no get them to inflate. My son told me the bike shop had a twenty pound lpg cylinder with a big wide thin nozzle on it that they slip between the rim and tyre and then discharge and it blows the tyre out almost like an explosion.. And he was right ! The lpg cylinder had some trick discharge valve that emptied the cylinder in about a second. They got them seated in a few minutes after I'd struggled and cursed for about two hours the day before. I think that I'll just be paying them the few bucks when the rears are due, and as a mech, I hate having to do that ! Haha.

I absolutely mean it Gw. Your contributions are invaluable to the response time and the depth of knowledge in here. Many days it's your input that's keeping the place active, and that does as you say, draw the people in.

And that, along with your great knowledge and experience, is what makes you such an asset to the site Gw. It's a good/better site for your presence Gw, and I thank you for that.

This is a good forum Chuck. As I understand it, it's run by only two guys, so they do an amazing job.

Good work. Thanks for the feed back.

Oh ok. So a drive shaft, except a drive shaft that does six times the usual drive shaft revs, and spins the whole time.. Keep your legs away from it. Haha.. Just kidding. I'm sure it's very safe; Honda made it. You might get bits for those couplings. They use similar in other things. Over here I'd contact a transmission co, some one that did belts, chains, reduction boxes, driveshafts and parts.. industrial transmission.. for in factories, and auto. Honda might have brought them in like they do with carbs.

0.001-0.003 for inlet, 0.003-0.005 for exhaust. Cold.

Gw's got an important point here.. Something we see quite often in here with the quads is that someone replaces a carb because they have a problem, but then the new carb doesn't stop the problem, and so they assume the problem isn't with the fuel mixture. They they go off on a tangent assuming it must be electrical or compression etc. Replacement carbs do quite often run badly because they aren't tuned for the engine they are going one. So then you need to go through a tuning and adjusting process to check whether it is the new carb not tuned, or a lack of compression, blocked exhaust or bad spark problem. It is generally best (simplest) to clean the carb that came or had been running well on the bike. Let us know if the bike doesn't run well Don. Apart from the idle mixture it may need some other adjustments.

Ok. Hope that gets it running good. You'll probably need to adjust the new carb's idle mixture once it's warm.

So a protective cover over the shaft ? With a rusty looking UJ ? Oh no.. That brown bit's the rusty metal from the hole... Maybe. Or not.

Ha.. You'll get there. What is that we're looking at ?

Oh ok. I'd never clicked to that.. Well done. They do have other differences though too.. like body, cdi, carb etc.

Look at the supplement's index, that tells you what the differences are straight away. If the supplement doesn't mention something, then it's the same as the base model.

That one intermittent miss then going straight back to a steady idle again, that's a lean idle mixture. You could just try adjusting the idle mixture which might fix the misfire, but if it can't be coaxed to rev up, it probably has dirt in the carb, so I'd just pull the whole carb off, strip it entirely and clean every jet and drilling, check the float height then put it back on checking there are no splits or leaks in/at the manifold.

Most bikes they use the gear shift lever to disengage the plate clutch during gear shifts to save the gears if the centrifugal clutch is locked up, but if reverse doesn't use the shift lever to move into reverse then that shift is entirely dependent on the centrifugal being unlocked to prevent graunching. I'd check the idle speed. If this bike does use the foot shift lever for reverse then yup, adjust the clutch. Assuming that is the sort of problem it's having.. If it's just hard to move the lever/knob or some such, then check the interlock adjustment, and all the shift mechanism adjustments.

Get the manual, it describes the differences from the base model and year in the supplement at the back. There are heaps of minor differences, cdi, carbs, body panels, chain or shaft drive.. Those are some I've noticed, there might be more.

Well it sounds like a good mod then. It's a wonder honda hadn't done that... bolt in battery tray. If they had, they'd have nice captive or welded in nuts so you just use a socket and extension to whip it out simple as.. Just saying...

Gw's onto it !

Yeah taking the body work off will help a lot. The problem with a gauge is that they will show full voltage even if there's a real bad connection sometimes, and the voltage will only drop once the electrical load comes on. If you look up "voltage drop test" it will explain the proper way to use a gauge to find bad connections. It's easier to just use a test light with a regular old hot wire bulb in it because that will put a small load on the circuit and if there's a bad connection the light will be dull. If the tesla light has an led or something that doesn't draw a bit of a load it might not show up bad connections.

I thought that the ultra whatever cleaner you had did a pretty good job of cleaning things. I was very impressed by some before and after photos.

I haven't seen a set like that Gw.. Without ridges they would be better than a tip cleaner, and better than some scratchy bit of wire brush bristle(which a lot of people like to use), but I'd suspect they would have trouble getting varnish/build-up off. Do they go down small enough to do really small jets on bikes ? I've seen cleaners advertised for jets but they never did small jets, let alone the tiny holes in the emulsion tubes. I've been using wood for.. Err.. something like fifty years.. haha.. and it's always worked fine.

Those striped wires on that reg that look like yellow are presumably white, and their description would be W/r and w/l, l being what they use for blue. That being the case, I think you have got the 1987 230.. R/w mean a red wire with a white stripe, W/r means a white wire with a red stripe. The carb, if it's original, will have the Id number shown in that other pdf.. Something like 22A00, 18A00, 18A01 or 25C00. I would trust the regulator wiring more than the carb id though because carbs are easy to change, but the wiring isn't.

You need to get a service manual which will have a wiring diagram in it, and you need to use a test light to check wih the diagram that the electricity is getting through the wires to the places it's meant to be going. There's every chance that there is a broken wire or a bad connection in the wiring, and not some electrical component. Wires mostly break right where they go into the metal terminal on the end of the wire, and they often break inside the insulation with no visible evidence, but if you wriggle the wire gently it will feel too floppy because there's nothing but plastic holding it. The other problem they can get is dirty connection where the wire's crimped into the metal terminal. Some wiring looms also have wires joined internally, inside the taped up loom, and some of those connections are crimped and can get bad connections. Those you just have to deduce are bad connections by noticing there is power on one side of the connection and not the other side. Connections in wires are shown as a black dot where the wires cross in the diagram. Wires that cross without a dot aren't connected. You need to start by checking the earth wires are connected and making contact, then start at the battery and follow the wiring diagram to the switch and reg etc checking there is power as there should be. Use a test light because highly sensitive electrical gauges can deceive you. If you have any trouble reading the wiring diagram let us know and I'll explain it to you.