I am such a Dork at times...
I had scheduled 5 days off last week for maintenance and some upgrades on the Concours. Valve adjustment, new headlight harness, accessory wiring, oil change, maybe some driving lights.
Since it was my first attempt at the valves, I wanted plenty of time and not be in a hurry. The Concours is a very Owner Friendly motorcycle (That means it's old school technology) and there is plenty of help and info out there in the COG (Connie Owners Group) for newbies like me. Stripped all the bodywork off Monday night and tuesday did the valves w/o any real problems. Pretty straight forward. Hooked up the wiring for the headlight and the accessories to. Cool. Put things back together and fired her up! SHIT! only 2 cylinders firing. What the heck?
Check firing order, plugs (new already), coils, connections. Yeah, it's got spark. Yeah, shit. There's fuel to the cylinders too. This is not right.
I have a regular habit of topping off the gas tank before I go home. That's about 7-1/2 gallons on the Connie. That got old real quick, taking that heavy bastard off and on about 15 - 20 times, trying to figure out what the heck I screwed up.
I knew it was something simple, because I hadn't really done anything to screw it up that bad. The cylinders that wern't firing were fed from both coils (and THAT should have been my big tip off). I kept checking wires and connections, over and over. Pulled the valve cover off again and rechecked the settings to make myself positive I hadn't, somehow dicked that up enough to cause this problem.
Finally, I just quit and let it sit for a day or 2 and did Honeydo's.
Well, when I went back and started to look at things the 1st thing I checked again was the firing order and the plug wires. DOH! There it was. I had swapped around a couple 'a wires.
That was the 1st thing I had checked and I probably had those wires off and on 15 times.
And I put them back on wrong- EVERY SINGLE TIME. EVEN THO' I THOUGHT I WAS CHECKING THEM AGAINST THE FIRING ORDER IN THE MANUAL!!!
Oh Man! That was painful. All I could do was laugh at my amazing dorkiness. I thought I had learned that lesson 35 years ago and never thought I'd do that trick again.
Just shows that "you can't teach an Old Dick new trogs".
I had scheduled 5 days off last week for maintenance and some upgrades on the Concours. Valve adjustment, new headlight harness, accessory wiring, oil change, maybe some driving lights.
Since it was my first attempt at the valves, I wanted plenty of time and not be in a hurry. The Concours is a very Owner Friendly motorcycle (That means it's old school technology) and there is plenty of help and info out there in the COG (Connie Owners Group) for newbies like me. Stripped all the bodywork off Monday night and tuesday did the valves w/o any real problems. Pretty straight forward. Hooked up the wiring for the headlight and the accessories to. Cool. Put things back together and fired her up! SHIT! only 2 cylinders firing. What the heck?
Check firing order, plugs (new already), coils, connections. Yeah, it's got spark. Yeah, shit. There's fuel to the cylinders too. This is not right.
I have a regular habit of topping off the gas tank before I go home. That's about 7-1/2 gallons on the Connie. That got old real quick, taking that heavy bastard off and on about 15 - 20 times, trying to figure out what the heck I screwed up.
I knew it was something simple, because I hadn't really done anything to screw it up that bad. The cylinders that wern't firing were fed from both coils (and THAT should have been my big tip off). I kept checking wires and connections, over and over. Pulled the valve cover off again and rechecked the settings to make myself positive I hadn't, somehow dicked that up enough to cause this problem.
Finally, I just quit and let it sit for a day or 2 and did Honeydo's.
Well, when I went back and started to look at things the 1st thing I checked again was the firing order and the plug wires. DOH! There it was. I had swapped around a couple 'a wires.
That was the 1st thing I had checked and I probably had those wires off and on 15 times.
And I put them back on wrong- EVERY SINGLE TIME. EVEN THO' I THOUGHT I WAS CHECKING THEM AGAINST THE FIRING ORDER IN THE MANUAL!!!
Oh Man! That was painful. All I could do was laugh at my amazing dorkiness. I thought I had learned that lesson 35 years ago and never thought I'd do that trick again.
Just shows that "you can't teach an Old Dick new trogs".
posted by Grumpyunk at 7:34 AM
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