Let's see, the bike was bought on Monday, took it in Mon-Tues and got a $100 dealer quote to fix the petcock, the carb was rebuilt on Tuesday and petcock is currently being run in ON position   (hey, he knows its a bad vac petcock -- was told so by the dealership)  and he has now added a manual shut off valve that was added oh, lets say on Tues-Wed because his first post was on Thursday.   None of the carb rebuilds or shutoff things done so far will stop the bad vac petcock in the ON position from supplying insufficent gasoline and choking off the bike while it is running down the road.  

No mention has been made of whacking the float bowl with the big screw driver handle in order to jar loose a float assembly that might have gotten stuck when the bike ran out of gas due to bad vac petcock starvation, so this hasn't been tried yet.

Now "somebody familiar with bikes" has looked at it and "it turns over too easy" so  first it was the cam chain tensioner, now it is bent valves.

(I'm keeping a map of where we have been so far -- I do love these little magical mystery tours I do ...)

Note that he still hasn't done anything we have suggested yet, nor touched a wrench to hand in pursuit of anything said here.

(A compression check would be nice around now, with like some numerical results)

Energizing the solenoid while the bike was running down the road would make a single pop sound (solenoid thunking) and valves would be held open for <1 second while the pop sound was being heard.  

Solenoid mechanism jamming open is a possibility but has not happened before, so it might be unlikely but it is possible.   Solenoid mechanism lifts one exhaust valve about 1/6" but the cam opens it a whole lot further.  The two are not additive, the cam is the big mover, not the solenoid.

Hitting the valves with a stock piston simply isn't going to happen. Floating the valves repeatedly at very high rpms with a stock piston with even a Stage 2 high lift/duration cam does not result in any valve/piston contact (and does no damage either).

well i had some time off today so i did a compression check on the bike and it barely registered on the guage, so i dug in, found that somone took the engine apart before and must have forgotten to put the ring on the wrist pin     ... so to make a long story short does anyone know if a 1997 cylynder and piston will work on my 1987? its the only one i can find on ebay at the moment, still looking though

car7083 wrote on 04/22/12 at 15:43:14:


You sure it ain't the stock petcork?  

verslagen1 wrote on 04/22/12 at 15:55:02:

ok, guess ill go ahead and get it, thanks

try a post in the market place.