The good news was it was warm outside and all our batteries were in working order. The bad news was one of our trusty Yamahas was just barely clinging to life and we had no idea what the problem was. And it was about to get dark and lonely in here.
Evidently, we would be delayed leaving town. Finding a place to sleep would not be a problem, but a place to fix the bike – that was a pickle. Getting a repair shop to look into this would be our last resort. All over US and Canada motorcycle shops are notorious for long delays when performing a major service and worse yet, when you come in with a mysterious engine issue. They are ok to quickly change your tires, oil and chain, get the payment according to a fixed price list, and send you on your way. What they don’t like is a problem that could take so long to troubleshoot, the customer would run off without paying the bill.
We felt prepared to handle it on our own, but we needed a safe place to do it. Just like in Anchorage when replacing the cylinder on this bike a few months ago, we reached out to other riders in the area. Within a few minutes I got a call on my phone. A call! With a voice! Jim asked a few questions to confirm the situation, and then told me it will all be fine, to just head over to his house, here is how to open the door, make yourselves comfortable, take the car out to get dinner, and he would be back in a couple of days as he was away on a work trip. In slight disbelief at our luck and his incredible generosity we coerced the struggling Yamaha to fire up and limped to our home for the next few days. It took countless attempts running full speed downhill to get the engine to turn, and then it died a couple of times along the way, but we made it.
We got some food and started getting comfortable in the garage. Seats came off and we continued the meticulous process of removing and swapping more and more parts. That’s the beauty of having two identical motorcycles, we can just swap various bits to confirm if they work correctly.
This exercise carried on through the evening and all of next day. Relays, spark plugs, gas tanks, exhausts, fuel injectors, you name it, we swapped it. We noticed the spark plug boot had some visible damage, as if it got slightly melted and deformed. Aha! This must be it! In another life I had a problem with a Kawasaki Versys 650 where a faulty spark plug boot was causing all sorts of issues. We swapped the spark plug boots, but whatever sparks it was creating was still not enough.
It came to the point where the only possible problem was the engine itself. How could it be? We had it rebuilt with new components just a few months ago, in Anchorage. We continued testing parts bit by bit. We noticed that if we removed a hose that supplied vacuum to get fuel from the wings of the oversized gas tank, the bike ran sort of better. Lots of head scratching involved. Lots of listening to the fluctuations of the sounds as the engine ran in different configurations, how quickly it quit under one set of conditions vs another. Eventually Jim showed up and obviously he was keen on joining the charade.
It wasn’t all about bike fixing. Being in a big metropolitan area, we enjoyed the finer things in life. For instance, shopping at Trader Joe’s. Jim fried us eggs for breakfast, and we showed off our exceptional baking skills by preparing frozen chocolate croissants from TJ’s. YOLO, I ate two.
The chocolate must have provided our brains with missing nutrients and we got the courage to take the head cover off and measure the valve clearances. The reason for the delay on such a seemingly simple check is because removing the head cover requires disconnecting the throttle cables from the throttle body, and putting them back on is a rather frustrating exercise that bends and weakens the strands. My secret fear is that eventually they will snap at the least opportune moment.
Well, one of the intake valves was so tight, it was effectively negative. It made sense in retrospect – poor compression. We managed to find a shim that brought it closer to specifications, and voilà, the bike started and ran without any hesitation!
Much rejoicing followed. We went out for a celebratory dinner, the mood noticeably more relaxed. Although we still had to find a shim that would put the valve clearance into spec, instead of just close to it, there was light at the end of the tunnel. As the nearby mountains received a fresh dusting of snow, we sketched a route to avoid the white stuff and shivered with antici-
-pation.
