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So some weird things happened on my first decently long ride on the GS last night. I don't know at what point this stuff happened, but it changed the bike pretty dramatically.
The previous owner, in an attempt to circumvent the bike's weak ignition and notorious charging system, installed a headlight cutoff switch to aid in charging the battery. Leave it off, and the headlight doesn't come on when the bike is running. It'd worked just fine so far, but then yesterday all the sudden the headlight worked on its own - indepedently of whether the switch was on or not.
Ok, no big deal to me since the battery works pretty well now and starts the bike fine, but there's another quirk to this that I discovered on my long ride last night: Flipping the switch to 'on' slightly improved the illumination from the headlight. What the? Anybody got a theory on this?
So I went on the longest ride so far last night - a 30 minute trip from my house to my friend's house. The bike ran very well the whole time aside from still not being able to idle at all. It will die within a second or two of dropping the throttle unless half choked.
I say ran very well because it no longer appears to have the aforementioned bain of its performance - the 7,500rpm brick wall it had been hitting on acceleration. The reason for this was really obvious to me after running it to 10,000 in first gear once or twice: The TACH was the problem the whole time!
I'm not kidding. The bike sounds the same as before, runs the same as before, gets just as loud as before as it approaches the top end of the rev range, but now the tach actually reads 10,000 when it's screaming its head off and running out of power suddenly. So much for that problem. Of course this is slightly disappointing since I thought the bike had more power waiting to be unleashed, but this saves me some trouble.
The tach had worked perfectly fine before. It tracked the revs smoothly and didn't seem to be lagging behind anything; it just didn't go past 7,500rpm. Strange eh? Is this a normal occurrence?
The previous owner, in an attempt to circumvent the bike's weak ignition and notorious charging system, installed a headlight cutoff switch to aid in charging the battery. Leave it off, and the headlight doesn't come on when the bike is running. It'd worked just fine so far, but then yesterday all the sudden the headlight worked on its own - indepedently of whether the switch was on or not.
Ok, no big deal to me since the battery works pretty well now and starts the bike fine, but there's another quirk to this that I discovered on my long ride last night: Flipping the switch to 'on' slightly improved the illumination from the headlight. What the? Anybody got a theory on this?
So I went on the longest ride so far last night - a 30 minute trip from my house to my friend's house. The bike ran very well the whole time aside from still not being able to idle at all. It will die within a second or two of dropping the throttle unless half choked.
I say ran very well because it no longer appears to have the aforementioned bain of its performance - the 7,500rpm brick wall it had been hitting on acceleration. The reason for this was really obvious to me after running it to 10,000 in first gear once or twice: The TACH was the problem the whole time!
I'm not kidding. The bike sounds the same as before, runs the same as before, gets just as loud as before as it approaches the top end of the rev range, but now the tach actually reads 10,000 when it's screaming its head off and running out of power suddenly. So much for that problem. Of course this is slightly disappointing since I thought the bike had more power waiting to be unleashed, but this saves me some trouble.
The tach had worked perfectly fine before. It tracked the revs smoothly and didn't seem to be lagging behind anything; it just didn't go past 7,500rpm. Strange eh? Is this a normal occurrence?
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