82 Gs850 Gl Question..He...HE...HE

[BigDaddyKool]

EXPERIMENT TIME:

O.K. Hello. I just bought a 1982 GS850GL with 12,160 original miles for 200 bucks. Ran like garbage, so heres what i did....Pulled the carbs, cleaned main jet, needle jet, float and needles...think you guys know what im getting at. So I start the bike with the airbox removed...and good idle but a little pop every 4 or 5 second and death with 1/4 throttle or more. Sooooo I figure I'm getting too much air now so heres what I did. Just to see what it would look like I popped the 4 stacks out from the airbox and mounted them to the carbs. Obviously still too much airflow but looks cool . Next I took (4) 2 1/4" adjustable clamps and covered each individual stack with a piece of heavy duty extremely tight knit lint free cloth. Fire it up and uh oh now not enough air so I slice with a new razor a very small slit(about 3/16") in the center of each cloth allowing just a little more air through.
This bike now runs so good that I hate to fix it the right way It begs for throttle and it rips from idle to w.o.t. with a devlish sound. My real question is if I want to run the open stacks has anyone out there rejetted with this setup and had luck without adjusting the air screws in the carbs? It has a stock 4-2 exhaust. OR is it possible to adjust the air screw so that rejetting can be avoided? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
By the way I've owned 3 bikes, a 82' Yamaha maxim 650, 67' BSA thunderbolt hardtail chopper, and a Honda Shadow 750, and the GS850 although in my garage being tinkered with and has not been ridden yet is my favorite of all

[Steve]

I have not had to rejet like you are wanting to, but I did experience similarly poor running without the airbox attached.

What I did while getting the bike to run decently in the garage was to hang a shop rag over the intakes, and zip-tie the rag to the two outside carbs so it would not get sucked in. That seemed to provide just enough restriction to allow the carbs to respond to opening the throttle. I did not take this setup out on the road for a test, it was just a temporary thing in the garage, but it worked well enough.

[bwringer]

You'd have to install new jets to run pod filters or pantyhose bug screens or whatever... the idle screw only has a limited effect on idle mixture.

It amazes me sometimes how just when you're tired of seeing the same stupid question over and over (I left my GS sitting behind the shed for two years - how come it won't idle?), someone will come up with a question that not one other sane person has asked in 25+ years of GS history.

Hats off to you, sir. That's the first time I've seen the "poking carefully calibrated holes in cloth" method of intake tuning!

[BigDaddyKool]

:P Howdy again, im about to take this beast for a test ride to see how it reacts on the road with my "poke-a-hole" method, better take my razorblade with me in case I have to cut on the fly What I wish was that there was a means to measure how much air i'm sucking in through the stack at different throttle speeds like a guage for cfm or something. Hey wait a minute now, I just came up with another crazy idea, i'm going to go check it out I'll be back on in 8 hours to let ya know how it worked with pictures too.

[threebtbird]

Cool filters

Hey man, I had the same problem with my bike and it did the same thing with the airbox off, but my airbox was permenantely damaged, the robber boots from the carbs into the airbox were messed up because someone tried to mess with them before. So i did the same thing with the cloth and one got sucked into the carb, you dont want this to happen it went straight to full throttle and i was stuck. Luckily it pulled out with a pair of needle nose pliars and didnt do any damage to the carb. But heres what i found. I was looking on ebay one day about 2 years ago and saw they sold individual air filters. Just cone filters one for each carburator. They were 40 bucks for the set, worked great and the bike ran like a dream, just the right amount of flow. They looked pretty badass on it also. And you can even get a small breather filter for the crankcase. Pretty cool and cheap fix. I really liked them and recomend tryin to get a set. http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Suzuk...QQcmdZViewItem . Check those out, im not sure if they will work for your bike, but he said he has other sizes, im sure you could find that out somewhere. Happy riding :-D

[BigDaddyKool]

So I'm an electrician, and electricians use a very wide variety of material to build what we build. At work today I scored some 1 1/2 steel threaded(inside thread) couplings and they fit very tight into the rubber airbox stacks, I'm going to thread a fitting into the end of the coupling that can house a small filter element and drill test drill test drill test until I find out what I have to do to make this engine rip with no airscrew modification and stock exhaust with no rejet. By the way it actually looks pretty cool . I should be able to hone in on exactly how much airflow I need by using a super small bit to make the holes. Okay time to go build it.