Poorly stored, trying to resurrect 1983 GR650 Tempter

[Skateguy50]

Some of my dirty carb picks to show you there is still hope.


All the carbs with the bowls off. (can you guess which main jet broke after the first cleaning?)


The Old Gas Bowl.


The Rust Bowl.


The "Good" Bowls.

[650BrownDeer]

Third Time???

Thanks to everyone for your words of encouragement and direction.

My first move was to call a dealer that I had a great experience with before on this project. The parts guy there wanted to know what happened that I needed to replace the whole set of jets. I told him about the storage and so on, and he started to chuckle. He said something to the effect of he was unwilling to sell something that was not needed. That I just needed to tear it all apart, and clean in detail, scrub everything.

I sat for quite a while with these thoughts, before I worked up the courage to go out to the garage and take another stab at the carb. I've become very good at pulling it off the bike.

I took the whole thing apart down to where I had it yesterday. What was left were the Main Jets, Valve Assembly and pilot Jets.. So, all these came out and lot of scrubbing, air pressure and at one point even a sewing needle to clean the pilot jets.

Between soaking and scrubbing and all of that I found some very interesting chunks of crud in very telling places.


For example. I tried very hard to remove the valve assembly from the carb, but it would not budge. Remember, I had one bowl that never took on any gas, so I thought this would mean some detailed cleaning here. What I found was the whole interior - where gas was to have flowed was packed with crud and after a good soak and some scrubbing with a metal brush and dentists metal pick I got it all nice and shiny! It was this that told me exactly why I had that problem. Both valves were cleaned in great detail. A nice way to spend a beautiful afternoon in the garage, listening to an oldies station.


The jets were very telling. The main on one side was 90% clogged and the other was not very much better. A good soaking, some scrubbing, poking and they were both cleaned. (Sorry - new camera and didn't figure out how to do macro setting!)

I set my compressor for about 100 lbs and used jet on the end of it and decided to spray out every hole I found on the carb. During that action, by the way, my valve assemblies popped off and I could get them apart and cleaned. I found other tubes that offered some resistance and reamed them, soaked them, sprayed them until the looked nice and clean.

I put the whole thing back together again.. no parts left over.. a good sign. Once again put it all back on the bike. (Those rubber air tubes are a pain!) and hoped it would be a while until I needed to do this again.

Then came the return of the gas tank and my first attempt at cranking it.

The result. Well, the first crank didn't do anything but a few bangs from the engine out the exhaust, and then, a second crank and...

She Runs! \\/ I stood there for one second, waiting for it stop running, but she kept going. This was of course followed by my best imitation of Tom Hanks in Cast Away remarking "I have made fire" subsituting motorcycle for fire!

I still have a bunch of other troubles, guages that don't work like the fuel and Odomometer and she started changing speeds on me while she sat. I have a whole bunch of chrome to get back to some level of shine and a body to make work well, return turn signals that were removed at some point, but she runs!

Thank you everyone for your help. I'll be adding other questions as I tackle them!