r/Airheads

again, long story short;

carbs were gummy and def a factor. thank you for all who let me know, i’ve got rebuild kits en route.

but my weak spark turned into a no spark situation. I’ve been truly baffled trying to fix it as the previous owner seems to have monkeyed with the system.

After extensive testing and bypassing of various components, and cursing out the man who decided to change things in here, I stopped to ask myself why they appeared to be a condenser on the side of what should have been the hall effect sensor.

Upon removing the front of the can, I found a set of points. No freaking idea why or how they’re there, but they are.

Going to diagnose more and figure out if they’re just glazed or the condenser went bad. what a trip. why he would modify this bike to have an OLDER system, i’ll never know…

Long story short, just got an 81’ r65 and have been loving the crap out of it. Spent a day doing minor repairs, lik fixing the odometer and adjusting the valves and such before taking a friend for a ride the next day. now, it was 100 degrees and boiling, but still we wanted to go and so we did. rode 10 min, got coffee, then on the way back it died. let it sit then it started again, limped it home and started trying to figure out what went wrong.

its got this crazy rough idle, and it does not change w starting fluid. Made me think it was spark, so i looked at and replaced the original bosch gray coil that people said was probably the problem with a new harley coil, the dyna brown 31614-83A. Swapped it over, same poor running condition.

Could this be as simple as bad spark plugs and leads? I cleaned the carbon off them but still not much change. again, no change w starting fluid. Really at a loss. any advice is appreciated.

Attached is the running condition i get, regardless of fuel situation.

Well it's on the road and so far so good. Seems to haul the mail pretty well, brakes are surprisingly decent for everything I've read about the stopping power of drum brakes. Has no issue getting to 60mph, guess it's just getting used to getting off a 102hp triumph and onto a 50 hp BMW.

Needed to remove the headset races on my 75/5 so I figured I'd share an old trick for removing those pesky headset races. It's hard to get into the backside of race and tap it out so I used an old welder trick for blind race removal.

Just ran a quick bead on the face of the bearing race. This causes the race to shrink as it cools and it basically comes right out. With the tig it didn't even burn the paint on the headset section of the frame. You can do this with with other welding methods like wire feed, but it was so clean with the tig I'd recommend it over the other styles of welding.