Day One

So day one with the bike finds it in its new home. It took some work to get this are of the garage cleaned out, but it fits nicely here. I hope to have enough space to perform any work required to get it roadworthy again.

The first thing I did was check the gas tank and it was pretty empty. I poured a can of Sea Foam into it and filled up with fresh gas to see what would happen. Eventually it kicked over and would do a rough idle at full choke only. I let it run a bit until the engine warmed up and the idle was smoother, but I could not get it off full choke and any attempt to rev would kill the engine.

I decided to rebuild the petcock replace the fuel filter thinking there was some fuel starvation, but no. The problem must be deeper.

I believe the problem has something to do with the carburetor assembly. Luckily this is an easy thing to pull out and work on in the Goldwing... NOT! Really this took a few days of fiddling with and getting the right tools before I could successfully remove the carbs, and in the process I could tell there was a lot of rubber on this bike that will need to be replaced.

With the carbs out of the way I could see some of the heat shield mat was crumbling. This is supposed to help prevent the fuel from boiling (?) in the carbs. I'll order a replacement because this one has seen better days.

I tried to take a look at some of these vacuum lines under the mat since I know they can be a source of problems on these bikes, but it's pretty difficult to follow anything here.

I decided to go ahead and do a full rebuild of the carbs since I am 90% sure that they are the problem here. Unfortunately that means I need to order more parts. Fortunately, though, I have never done this before so what could go wrong.

For now this is how she sits.