I spent the day wrenching on my machine. First up, the Fred H. progressive throttle pulley mod.
I went to Home Depot for 12 gauge copper wire. It turns out they have single-conductor stuff, and it's 28 cents a foot. If you take that to the self-checkout, the dude there gets so flustered trying to find the code, he tells you to just take it. So I did. I also picked up some Goo Gone and some Blue Lock-Tite.
It turns out I have the same metal ruler as Fred. So I used his picture to fashion the best damn copper hook I could. I thought, instead of doing this barbarian style, with a hammer, I'd use my super fancy (do you see it creeping in) Dremel tool. That way, I could form the taper on the inside of the radius, the way it should be. When it looked perfect, I went out and disassembled the bike. When I still couldn't see anything that looked like Fred's pics, I took out most of the air induction stuff. I grabbed my one pair of hemostats (I left the other pair in some poor ******* in the la Drang Valley, in 1968). What the hell? There are two different types of pulleys on the 2006? This damn copper hook will never fit. I go back inside. Oh - centimeters. Damn. Where's my snips? Where's my Dremel tool? Razzle frazzle.
After an hour, it becomes clear I never should have left those hemostats in that dude. I can't place the hook over the tang on the throttle pulley to save my life. Okay. Screw this.
While I'm under the tank, I decide to undo the center spring. That comes off with no problem and does the 360 everyone has mentioned. Not satisfied, I forced the spring completely off the tang. This actually takes a bit of fussing (did I just use that word?) to get it off (or those?). The throttle still returns fine without it.
I also decided to take the slack out of the throttle cables. I took most of it out at the throttle pulley, but I was quickly running out of threads on the adjuster because there was so much slack. So I tightened the lock bolt with a thread or two to spare and took the remaining slack out at the hand grip.
I figured that most of the work for a TBS had been done trying to do the Fred Progressive Pulley mod, so I decided to do another TBS, even though I'm still under 4K miles and I've already done one. Why not, maybe the Barbarian Jumper Mod from yesterday made a difference. Besides, I just wanted to see the mercury getting thucked out of the Economy Carb Tuner one more time. It turns out that all 4 cylinders were pulling a little bit higher, but were all within 10 mm of each other. I decided to decrease them all to 240mm since the gauge reads high and I need a feeling of accomplishment after failing at the Fred mod. So I line them all up really close at 240 and slap the bike back together.
Then what'd I do? Test ride!?!?! Of course, right? NOPE. Not me. I put all the tools away and washed the bike.
Yep. I'm gay.
