Hi! I'm brand new here so please excuse any newbie mistakes I may make. We have 2 Savages. Mine is a '98 and my husband's is an '03.  We have had them for about 5 years and never had any real problems with them. Yesterday we took them on a longer ride and they both started acting up. Sputtering and then cutting out. We had just filled them up so it wasn't an empty tank. Yes I remembered to take it off reserve. It got especially bad trying to go uphill. Mine died out twice and my husband's died once. We figured it was just b/c we had run them low on gas and there was some sediment floating around. Once it got settled back down they would be ok. We managed to get home and parked them for the night. In looking online as to what the problem could be, we came across this site. We decided to add an inline fuel filter to filter out any gunk that might be the problem. He got mine done and we took them out for a ride. It is still chugging and sputtering and dying. In fact it completely died out and left me stranded. At first there was fuel going through the filter (we got a clear one so we could see it) but after a couple of miles, it was bone dry. It's like the gas isn't flowing like it should. His bike was sputtering but not as bad as mine. I couldn't even get mine to start back up today. He is thinking that we need to tear the carb apart and clean it and also clean the petcock and change the oil and oil filter and air filter. To take it somewhere to have it done will be about $300. Does anyone have an opinion on what the problem could be? He called the repair place and asked if it could be the petcock and they told him that you never need to clean the petcock and that it isn't that but I have read a lot of posts on here that say you DO need to clean and/or completely change it. I am a little leery about taking it to them. The carb was tore apart and cleaned about 2 years ago (someone different than the repair place).

My guess would be either a petcock issue as explained, or loose/cracked vacuum lines (cheap & easy to replace), or some gunk in the carb (try some seafoam in there before tearing it down)

If I read correctly they both started giving problems after you filled up?  Possibly just be a bad load of gas.

Suprised no one else has mentioned this, but if it struck both bikes at the same time, right after a fill-up, it's probably bad gas. I'd start with draining and replacing the gas before taking anything apart.

After mine did it yesterday, he told me that his had done it about a week ago. It was different gas from completely different places so I don't think it's that, but Thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks! We will be looking into getting 2.
He says that it's not bad gas b/c with the clear in-line filter we can see that it's not getting gas.

My bike has 9710.3 miles on it.
Took the gas cap off and it started right up and the inline filter filled up with gas.
The vac line has no gas in it.
It seems the problem is that the gas doesn't flow when the bke is in gear and moving. It will run until the fuel that has accumulated in the inline filter runs out and then it dies.

I don't know if it works with the cap off. It works in the garage but how can I drive it with the gas cap off to see if gas will continue to flow into the filter?