Hi everybody,
I haven't been on these boards in about 15 years or so.
I built a bike with the help of this forum and and some very knowledgeable people locally back then. I was around 36 or 37 years old when I started getting interested in these bikes, I'll be 52 in January.
It ended up being a fairly successful build for my first time considering all the work that was done. I say fairly successful because I was never able to tune it to the point to where I was totally happy with it. It ran incredible with the right fuel under the right conditions.I had a lot of really fun rides and got a lot of very positive feed back from people. My longest ride was from Portland Or. to Tacoma Wa. to the Lemay car museum for a big motorcycle show, it lightly rained most of the way up there (side note about the ride up, I had a few highway races with my friend who was on a naked GL 1,000 and smoked him every time). I got there, cleaned the bike up best I could with some cleaner and rags I brought with me and ended up taking third place in my class then rode home. My point is that the bike ran really well and could be ridden for an extended period no problem.
However, the bike always tended to run hot and was prone to overheating and slight pre-detonation if not carefully monitored. I could control this reliably by running 100octane low lead aviation fuel or a mixture of this and 92octane down to somewhere around 1 part av fuel to 2 parts 92 and run fine (please don't flame me for running this fuel on the street, I know its not great but it was helping me diagnose issues I was having). Anyway, there's a lot more to this part of the story as far as things that I did to try to remedy the situation as far as tuning and adjustments to carbs and timing and would be happy to get into that if people want to talk about it.
Family life happened, had a kid, started working more, started riding less and less and eventually not at all. The bike got covered and sat in the garage for almost a decade. I would try to get it out once in a while and start it and take a short ride but even that was few and far between.
I am at a point now where I am consciously trying to work less and make more time for myself and my hobbies including this motorcycle. I want to make another attempt to get this thing running like it should. I recently pulled the motor out of the frame and pulled the head and cylinders to take a look. Everything looked surprisingly good. Put it all back together and now I'm at the point of degreeing the cam.
This brings me to the main point of this post. I honestly cant remember the lobe center numbers that I used when I installed this cam initially so while doing research I have come up with three different sets of numbers for this cam, its a bit confusing and at this point I'm not sure which way to go. I was hoping that some of you knowledgeable people who have experience with this might be able to point me in the right direction. Maybe I had the lobe center adjusted too tight and that was contributing to higher cylinder pressures and therefore more heat and more prone to pre-det?? Not sure, just looking for opinions on this at this point. I plan to call cyclex next week but have a lot of time off to work on the bike right now.
Its a cyclex CX3 cam, a webcam 63a clone as far as I know. Ported head, cyclex 850kit, CR29carbs w/pods.
thanks.
