A friend of a friend gave me an '83 Aspencade. Complete and remarkably nice for having 111,000 miles and living outside (under a shed) for the last 10 years. A little frame rust and a lot of the usual old bike issues.
Of course it was "running when it was parked", aren't they all?
It had about 1/4 tank of gas which was nasty sludge. The parts that wasn't sludge was crusty rust.
Cleaning the tank and carbs was first priority so I could determine if it ran good enough to put time and money into.
Started by trying to remove the rear wheel so I could get to the gas tank. Easier said than done because the rear brake caliper mount is seized onto the axle, seriously seized, and being a single sided swingarm I didn't want to beat on the bolt--any harder than I did.
So I disconnected the drive shaft and pulled it off as a single unit. Still have to deal with that...
Pulled the gas tank and carbs. Cleaned the tank--soapy water and the assortment of bolts to break it up. Then electrolysis to pull out the rust. Then a light coating of 2 stroke oil to keep it rust free until it gets reinstalled.
Stripped the carbs down to 4 shells and soaked them in Pinesol to clean out the crap that blocked every orifice. Made sure it was spotless and rebuilt them with the to-good-to-be-true $29.00 carb rebuild kit from ebay. I was suspicious of the quality at that price, which was justified. Not enough of the O-rings to reassemble the 4 carbs into 1 unit and of course the accelerator pumps did not fit.
I sanded the acc pump shafts enough to get them to fit and used the best of new and used O-rings to reassemble the carbs and mounted them back on the bike. I used a remote gas tank, flushed the fuel pump and hooked up the fuel lines.
After a few minutes it did start. It is ROUGH, but running. But the accelerator pumps do not work, if you turn the throttle too fast it bogs or stalls all together. Slowly turning the throttle will let it rev thru 3K RPMs, which is about all I wanted to do with it sitting on the center stand with no wheel, swing arm or drive shaft.
Also, at least 2 of the carbs leak gas onto the case. Could be the O-rings between the carbs, could be the bowl seals, they were really thin compared to what I usually see. Could be that it leaked before, I wasn't the first person into them. I don't know why, but they do.
