Hey there, everyone.
So, I'm currently working on my first ever bike. I'm no mechanic, so this has been a trial and error sort of process. I have a feeling I'm still in the very beginning stages of my process, so I thought I'd document everything here.
I bought a CB550 off of a guy a few miles away from me. It's in decent condition, was missing side covers and main jets (how does that happen?).
I've always wanted a cafe racer, so that's my goal here, but before I spend any money at all on things like paint, seat, bars, I'm trying to get the engine running right - and that is where I've been hung up for over a month.
The first hurdle was finding an airbox and the missing jets and clips - check that off as a success. After some fiddling I got it running, but it never sounded quite right (at least for very long). At one point it ran and sounded amazing, but wouldn't come back below 3K rpm after it got that high.
Sometime during the first week or two of having the bike I tore apart the caliper and sanded it down, replaced the gasket, etc. It works fine now.
After that I did some carb cleaning, swapped the new idle jets in for the old OEM jets that I had (one was broke, had to get a replacement from harisluv). At this time I also tried my hand at a 3000 mile tune up- and I'm thinking I didn't do the greatest job at it.
Finally after I got it all assembled, it seemed to be running well. I rode it around my neighborhood, but eventually I felt like I lost a lot of power. It turns out one of the idle jets had backed out. At this time I also replaced my spark plug caps, the old ones were actually glued onto the wires for some reason and were really bad for not working if the wires moved much (I know, they're screw on and I could have just trimmed the wire and cleaned them out, screwing them back on, but there was glue down in the cap keeping me from re-inserting the wire with a good connection and it wasn't coming out at all!).
That brings us up to this week. I got all of the issues I was aware of straightened out, started her up and she sounded rough, and tended to surge from time to time. I tried to sync the carbs, no luck. Today I'm going to go back and completely redo the 3000 mile tune up, I'm not confident in the work I did before and wouldn't be surprised if that was the culprit.
My complete list of symptoms as of right now:
1. Throttle is slow to come off of idle, if I pull the throttle too quickly it kind of putters out.
2. When the throttle is up, the RPMs fall off very slowly.
3. Engine is running kind of rough, I can hear a light tapping (this might be the tappets, again, not confident in my previous work).
4. Spark plugs look sooty - I put new spark plugs in early on in my attempts to get the bike running. The exhaust also looks kind of sooty, but that may be because when I first got this thing going it shot black crud out everywhere for an hour or so (What could have caused that? I know the bike sat for about ten years, could that be it?)
5. I have replaced the sooty spark plugs, and the new ones don't look that great now either.
Plans for the immediate future:
1. Lubricate moving parts in carburetor.
2. 3000 mile tune up - again.
3. carb synch.
4. Considering raising my jet clips.
Pictures coming later today!
