February 2021
My friend's Suzuki Stinger came back with some issues after a period of storage. Are we seeing a trend here.?
Vehicles do not fare well during storage, but motorcycles fare even worse. Japanese bikes were the first to feature vacuum operated fuel taps, so that you could leave the fuel tap in the 'On' position as it would theoretically be 'Off' until one began kicking the engine over and creating a vacuum in the inlet manifold which would then operate the fuel tap automatically.
This did in fact work very well, and was a sophisticated addition to a motorcycle in the day. The problem was that one could not actually turn the fuel off completely, so running the float bowls out of fuel could only be achieved if one were to remove the vacuum line and block it, then run the bike until it stopped.
So nobody did. And if they stored the bike for some years, the fuel evaporated and the residues glued everything together in the lower reaches of the float bowls.
However, this bike had not been in storage for so long that the carbs were the main problem. In this case the crankcases had gathered a mixture of old fuel and oil which had fouled the plugs when the next startup was undertaken.
Needless to say - it didn't.
Fortunately, being as the cylinders are mostly horizontal on these engines, there are drain plugs provided. So I drained the cylinders and added some fresh 91, and changed the spark plugs, whereupon it lit up and ran very happily.
So that was a very brief but fortunate conclusion.
What a whizzy little bike it is.!