Friday the 13th "incident"

Yesterday, Friday the 13th, I was riding home eastbound on Arapahoe road at the peak of rush hour after another long day at work.

I was riding Brigitta, my '87 R80 Airhead Beemer which of late, had been exhibiting some climbing idle issues when warm.  I thought I'd dealt with such by turning the fuel mixture screw inwards or clock-wise 1/4 turn and things indeed had been stable.

As I crossed under the overpass for the I-25 super slab, her rpm's went into the 6000 range and her engine raced accordingly since I was only going perhaps 15 mph in the heavy traffic!  Not good.

Luckily, just letting out the clutch a bit more would settle things down enough for controllable riding.  I pulled into the Honda dealership, engine racing as I coasted to a stop.

I jiggled the throttle cables going to the carbs and the idle settled back down to normal once again.  Luckily, I'd not drawn anyone's attention with my racing engine sounds.

The engine still running, I put her on the center stand and tried jostling the splitter assembly where the throttle cable from the throttle grip enters and pulls on the two separate cables that go to each carburetor.  Voila, the problem went away, I could blip the throttle and it'd settle down nicely when released, as expected.

The ride home went fine and I took the 30 seconds or so to remove the gas tank off the motorcycle to expose her wiring/cabling/fuses and relays:

 Removing the gas tank on Brigitta is vastly simpler and faster than on Vikki, my '04 Suzuki V-Strom

Here's a shot of the splitter for the choke, I couldn't get a good angle on the one for the 

throttle cables but you get the idea.

I removed the heat damaged (after only 90,000 miles, dang Teutonic engineering) rubber covers and lubricated the cable where it enters the splitter assembly so that the cables now rotate easily within the small housing they connect to.

Did that on both ends, on both the choke and throttle cable splitters.  Replaced the rubber boots, wrapped some electrical tape around them since both were heat-cracked.  That should take care of the "sticking throttle cable" situation hopefully.

As long as I had the tank off, I decided to renew the heat sink paste one uses to transfer heat from the Ignition Control Unit to the heatsink:

 The silver plate is the heat sink, the black object is the ICU bolted onto it.

The heat sink paste that remained was still fine but enough had been used up to require more.

 Here's a view of the heat sink and the ICU, now separated, before I put more heat sink paste on.

This is the stuff I used, works fine, not expensive.

This tube has lasted me since I got the R80 back in 2008.

The above job done, I put the R80 back together.  Total time, perhaps 30 minutes or so.  

We'll see how she does on the commute next week.