I then decide to take the bike for it's first ride to work - a nice ride to central London and back. I notice some serious power problems. Although initially I thought the bike had the power of a 600 - that was only at low throttle. As soon as I gave the bike some large amounts of throttle for more acceleration, the bike would hesitate and stutter and very very slowly accelerate. I concluded that this must be a carb problem and as I hadn't yet overhauled the carbs I decide to go ahead and remove the carbs from the bike, separate them and dismantle them to see if I can spot a problem.
I couldn't really find anything obviously wrong. No obviously clogged jets or anything like that. So I go ahead anyway and do what the manual says and get some carb cleaner and blast each of the holes in the jets and each passageway in the carbs with carb cleaner followed by large amounts of compressed air. I did this in turn to each carb, and put it all back in the bike.
To my surprise this fixed the problem! The bike now felt much MUCH more responsive and much better when giving it large amounts of throttle.
Perhaps my blasting of passageways and jets with carb cleaner must have done something. I then go ahead and replace the spark plugs and air filter element with new parts as these had not been done. I go for some nice iridium plugs.
After this success with the carbs, I focus more on cosmetics and take off the exhaust headers and repaint them with VHT paint.
The wheels also get treated to a reflective strip around the rims...
The one thing thats bothering now is that rear tail light. I'm not a fan of old style bulbs as they don't have the brightness or the responsiveness when hitting the brakes so I decide first to keep the tail light housing and make up a board with leds to replace the bulbs.
I may end up ditching this idea if it looks rubbish, but we'll see what it looks like...
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