Day 30 - First Ride and Carb Sync

So I've fixed the brake light - it turns out the front brake light switch needed replacing as the internals were very worn and rusted. The rear brake light switch does work fine but the rear pads needed some rebedding into the disc which give the rear brake pedal some extra downward play and making the switch work like it should.

So here's a video of the first ride of the Hornet. I take it for a 20 mile ride which is mostly dual carriage ways and motorway. I keep the headlight on for visibility.

The next problem I had was when I went to start the bike to come back home - the battery was dead already. This led me to check out the rectifier which I subsequently did and found that the ground connection to the frame wasn't great so I cleaned that up.

The rectifier was also proven to be faulty. The manual says to put the headlight on high beam, and then get the bike to 5000 rpm, and the voltage at the battery should be around 13.5 - 15V. I was reading only 12.5 so after testing the stator and making sure that the resistance across the coils was according to specs I went and replaced the rectifier.

When going to sync the carbs, I found that I could only check them and found that they weren't too badly out of sync. The rough idle was in fact due to the fact I had disconnected the pair valve vacuum hose and I hadn't plugged the vacuum hole on the cylinder head. This was causing the rough idle. I only discovered this by accident when I noticed the idle sounded much better with the carb sync gauge hooked up.