First solo trip ever and FJR is acting up. Fuel problems i think

[spike747]

The temperatures is about 90F outside and I'm driving on the highway when all of a sudden the bike starts running terrible. Hesitation, bogging, and the bike wanted to stall. In fact when I pulled over on the side of the highway, it did stall. So I had just filled up at a small town, so I turned around and headed back. I drove about 20-30 miles after a fill up at Conoco when it happened. Could be a chance of bad gas, but the station had lots of pumps and was pretty busy with fairly new pumps. I'd be surprised if it was bad gas.

I have a PCV with autotune. I connected a laptop to the unit to see if something looked wierd. Well, I got the "device errors" showing up in the software at the bottom of the screen. The green light on the PCV was on and the red light was flashng. I don't know what the red light is. So I put the laptop away and was able to drive back to the small town. Luckily I have enough tools with me that I was able to get under the tank and disconnect the PCV. The only thing I'm not sure about is because I have autotune, the O2 sensor is not connected on my bike anymore. I assume the computer will go into open loop mode and probably has a default map it uses. Is that true? Will the bike run OK like this?

Also, when I was connected to the PCV, the software showed some trim values at -20? Lots of them too. So the first thing I thought was the wide band went bad. I had the switch set to learn mode so I switched to map mode and put the Fuel Moto tune it, but it didn't clear up the problem.

Now that I have the PCV disconnected, I'm sure the check engine light will come on. Bike started OK just now at the hotel. I'm going out for a bit of a ride, but keeping close to town just in case.

Any other ideas? Also I did check all my ground spiders. The ones under the tank and at the ECU looked fine. I've only had the bike since spring and very limited rainy days on it. I also put some dielectric grease on the spiders after I bought it. It truly feels like a fuel problem. Not an electrical one.

Thanks.

 

[wfooshee]

Bike will run without the O2 sensor, and will not throw a code.

Going from memory here, not actually looking anything up, but the O2 sensor is actually used in a surprisingly small amount of the running time.

 

[spike747]

Well I went for a half hour ride and removing the PCV seems to have made it better. The o2 is not connected and the check engine light did go on. Through the bin of facts I think it says that d61 shows the code which on my bike is 22.

I did a quick search here and it looks like it is the air box temperature sensor. Wierd, but it kinda makes sense I guess. Well I'm going to attempt to continue the trip tomorrow keeping my fingers crossed that the PCV was the problem.

 

[ahchiu]

I also have the PC5 with Autotune, I'm getting some slight surging/hesitation in the Autotune mode, when I have the throttle cracked open crusing along no big load on the engine, I'm not sure if it's adjusting the A/F ratio.

BTW I had bad surging with my PCIII, it was from a bad ground to the PCIII,it was loose.

 

[SkooterG]

Sounds like bad gas to me.

 

[spike747]

Well I certainly learned alot about this bike over this problem.

First things first, the problem clearly is the PCV. I got an RMA number from Dynojet yesterday. While I was in Montana I had limped the bike back to a small town and had disconnected the PCV. When I went for a small ride that night the bike ran fine. No seafoam and gas top up, just PCV removed. So I was reasonably sure I could make it home. The next day when I took off in the morning, the check engine light came on and the speedometer was not working. At this point I was on my way to my Yamaha dealership to get the spider recall so I figured I could live without a speedometer till I got there.

The code in register 62 was 42 I think. Speed sensor failure. So after the mechanic put the recall on he tried to reset the code. He had to do it a few times, but it finally removed itself, but the check engine light stayed on. It was only after he drove the bike over 40 mph that the light went out. I guess the bike needed him to prove that the speed sensor was working before it would clear the light. I figure the problem with the speed sensor originated from the PCV also since I have the speed sensor connected to the PCV for gear mapping.

Anyway after getting the bike home, I reconnected the PCV, updated the firmware, zeroed out the map and started the bike up. Everything worked fine for about 10 minutes or so. I probably got a dozen or so heat cycles of the e-fans in that time. Suddently the fuel trim shows -20, the A/F from the autotune shows 15 to 16:1 type numbers and the idle goes really rough. It was running really lean and it was the autotune that trimmed it to -20. I looked at the box that roughly represents idle in the map and it even showed -20 in the trim table. The bike is still running at this point, but really poorly. So I changed the -20 box to 0, sent the trim values and the bike starts running good again. A/F shows nice 13.5:1 numbers and fuel trim shows 0.

I basically left the bike running for another half hour or so and like clock work every 10-12 minutes the bike would either start idle bad or stall. I removed the autotune from the system and it still went bad. I'd try to read the map and it would give me errors. I got "devices errors" alot too. Jamie says that is common on these bikes to have device errors when idling due to a poor crank sensor voltage at idle or something like that, but Dynojet says it is not normal and when mine ran fine it did not have device errors ever. But when it ran poorly it had lots of device errors.

So I guess long story short, make sure you have all the tools necessary to lift your tank in case you need to disconnect the PCV. The tool kit on the bike does have everything you need, but a simple socket set can make the job much easier. Especially in 91F weather in the middle of no where.

 

[spike747]

Bike will run without the O2 sensor, and will not throw a code.

Going from memory here, not actually looking anything up, but the O2 sensor is actually used in a surprisingly small amount of the running time.

Dynojet told me "most" of Yamaha's injected bikes use the O2 below half of your full RPM range and below 40% throttle. So in FJR's case, less then 40% throttle and less then 4500 RPM. So if that is true, that would make it usable alot I would think. However, when in open loop the map the computer is using seems to work pretty good. I don't really notice much difference between now and when I had the O2 sensor connected.

I do however notice a difference in running with map files and running stock bike. The bike was much snappier off the line and pulled harder on the top end with the PCV connected. I'm anxious to get another PCV.

Also on a side note, I think anyone getting a PCV should go balls to the walls and get the autotune also. The final tune it came up with was alot leaner then Jamies. And when I said alot, I mean 10-20% leaner in the cruising range. My gas mileage was terrible when I first got the PCV and was using Jamies tune. I got a big chunk of that back when I put the autotune on. I don't think his tune is terrible since he has to make a tune that is safe for all situations and still makes more HP. But the autotune has the luxury of finetuning your A/F perfectly for your bike setup, altitude, temperature, barametric pressure, and gas quality. Plus if I want to try some air box mods, I can hack away and the autotune will compensate for all changes I do. Its great having a true feedback loop in the system. Additionally, I connected the speed sensor so I could calibrate the gear tables. I then made A/F tables for each gear. I leaned out 5th gear in the 3500-5000 RPM range and 2-20% throttle position range also. I think most of these numbers were 13.6:1. I adjusted them to average numbers of about 14.2:1. I swear I got about 5 MPG better after doing that. It definitely was noticeable when I went back through my mileage logs on my iPhone.

 

[SkooterG]

Glad you got it sorted out. When you leaned out the cruising range and observed increased mpg did you notice any increased heat also?

 

[spike747]

Glad you got it sorted out. When you leaned out the cruising range and observed increased mpg did you notice any increased heat also?

Nope no extra heat that i noticed. But the areas i leaned out generally are obtained when you are cruising at highway speeds.

Also i only leaned it upto 14.2:1. Dynojet tells me they measured fjrs at about 14.5:1 on stock computers. So im still richer then stock.

 

[FJRMGM]

a couple years ago my wife filled up her car at a Conoco station and got an entire tank full of what looked like root beer (including foam) and ran (not at all) like thats what it was.

$1500 later for a complete fuel tank and system flush along with injector cleaning, along with the $350 towing bill because it happened in a po-dunk town that had never heard of "Volkswagen" let alone have a dealer, it was repaired.

Due to persistant calling and complaints to Conoco HQ the entire bill was re-imbursed by them to us.

And the A-hole station owners denied everything, even though the car was running fine when it pulled into the station with an almost empty tank and only ran for about 50 yards after leaving the station.