Today it's the rear brake caliper going back on with new HEL brake line, then a brake bleed and if I have some extra time I'll finish up all the hardware bits and pieces on the front and rear and then turn to the engine.
The fuel injectors are coming out and getting ultrasonically cleaned and the rest of the system's getting a flush.
The odds and ends went together well. Even the brakes were quick to bleed, so with the wheels back on and the new brake lines installed I turned to the fuel injection.
The injectors highlighted in yellow above are press fit in and just pull out of the throttle body and the fuel rail behind.
The fuel rail is held in by clips and two bolts holding it in place relative to the throttle body.
The whole thing just pops out when you've undone the two bolts.
With the fuel injectors so easy to remove, I'll be quicker at cleaning them in the future.
Ultrasonic cleaners aren't expensive and do a great job on fuel injectors.
Cleaning doesn't take long if you remove the rail and injectors.
Ultrasonic cleaning gets into the small places.
The injectors press fit back into the throttle body with a beefy o-ring to seal them.
My fuel-line replacements for unavailable replacement rubber hoses for the vacuum driven idle control system (on the right) scored a two out of three. The far one on the left got kinked, so I cut back the hose and I'll see how it does shortened. If that doesn't work I'll start looking for stronger walled alternatives.
The other day I was once again going over the details on the Tiger after taking the tank of for the billionth time. Even though the stock pipes for the vacuum controlled idle system for the electronic fuel injection hold vacuum when I test them, I can't test that when they're on the bike, so they might be leaking where they join. I happened to have some fuel line in the right size, so I've taken out the Triumph hoses and put these clear ones on instead to isolate another possible point of failure. Once I got them in I fired up the TUNEBOY software and figured I'd run the idle control system test since it would move the plunger up and down and with everything off I could check to see that it's all working as it should, except the ECU wouldn't connect to the computer. I've done dozens of TUNEBOY adjustments now and know how the bike syncs with the PC over the serial port, but it wasn't connecting. While trying some variations I turned the ignition on on the bike and the ECU made unfamiliar popping noise, and then none of the dash lights would come on (the running lights still do though). The ECU no longer clicks off when the ignition is switched off either, which suggests it's not coming on either. The intermittent nature of this failure always made my ass twitch in terms of it being electronic rather than mechanical. Mechanical failures tend to be more consistent and easier to diagnose, and I've replaced everything around the idle control system now, so unless Triumph sold me a dickey idle control motor, which seems unlikely since the first one lasted 17 years and did over seventy-six thousand hard, Canadian kilometres and survived seventeen -40°C Canadian winters. Assuming all the new parts are working as they should, an ECU that was losing the plot is as likely a culprit as anything else I've been chasing, and now it seems to have popped entirely. So what do you do when your old Triumph's bike brain loses the plot? Get another, I guess. Used ones seems to be extraordinarily expensive and look to be in rough shape out of US used parts suppliers on eBay. And for some reason they're charging twice what European suppliers are for shipping. With that and the fact that The States seem like they're on the edge of a civil war, I think I'll be looking to the dependable Germans who have COVID19 well managed for a replacement Tiger brain. If I'm thinking that, I wonder how many other people are avoiding business with the US right now. But before I go that far, I'm a G.D. computer engineering teacher, so I'm hardly going to let an ECU go in the bin without having a go at it first. If this is a short or something simple, I can solve that easily enough. If nothing else I can see how the ECU is set up architecturally, but more often than not I'm able to get electronics I have to open up working again. Time to flex my soldering prowess. The most frustrating part about this is that I may well have solved the idle problem with replacement hoses, or maybe I didn't. Maybe I chased down all of these hoses and parts for nothing and it was the ECU losing the plot all along. Electronic Fuel Injection (EFI) is a wonderful thing, but the early systems were fragile. There a lots of posts online about early Triumph EFI headaches, and I've added to them. Guy Martin does a good special called The Last Flight of the Vulcan Bomber. They grounded the last of these nuclear bombers in 2015 because they no longer had the expertise and technology too keep them safely air worthy. In the show Guy talks about why there are plenty of older planes like Spitfires still flying when the Vulcan has to be grounded. He says the Spitfire was made from bicycle parts you could fabricate in a shed, so they're relatively easy to maintain. The Vulcan was an industrial machine with early electrical and electronic systems that were many times more complicated. He goes on to talk about how the Vulcan looked like it came from another planet when only seven years earlier an Avro Lancaster was the state of the art. There are performance advantages in these leaps forward, but there are also maintenance headaches that mean these early jets will never fly again.
Early fuel injected bikes are a lot like that Vulcan - they can do things earlier bikes can't like get better mileage, not need parts changed to ride at altitude and generally require less maintenance. I just fixed up one of the last carbureted bikes, a 1997 Honda Fireblade, over the winter. EFI was around then, but Honda wisely went for highly evolved carburettors rather than new, fragile and poor performing EFI systems. I rebuilt the carbs, which are a complex but highly evolved four-carb set, and the bike runs like a Swiss (or rather Japanese) watch. The EFI on the Tiger did the job without any attention for 17 years and seventy-six thousand kilometres including two rides into the Rockies - something no carburetor could do, but when it finally broke, boy did it break. It's things like this that will make these first generation EFI bikes rare in the future. Like the Vulcan, they're so complicated and difficult to maintain when they go wrong that they'll get retired from service where an older, simpler bike might still be fixable. RESOURCES FOR CHASING DOWN ECU PROBLEMS ON A TRIUMPH 955i MOTORBIKE: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Triumph-Speed-Triple-955-2000-2004-ECU-Steuergerat-CDI-S1000T3/324154967093?hash=item4b79244435:g:BCEAAOSwZrteryUL
I've been wondering why motorbikes don't seem to have moved on in the way that cars have. To that end I'm trying to find comparisons between 1960s (pre-oil crisis) vehicles and current vehicles. In trying to keep apples with apples and find stats for similar vehicles. The problem is a 1960s Cooper Mini doesn't have anything like the crash worthiness of a new Mini Cooper, and that crash worthiness costs weight, though not as much as you might think. The real cost in weight is our expectations around size. The new mini is significantly larger mainly because minimalist, small cars don't sell. Our improvements in engineering efficiency are often overshadowed by our need for bigger, more plush vehicles. My thinking is that this shouldn't be such an issue on a motorbike, it's not like our bikes have gotten much bigger in the way that cars have turned into SUVs. An example, the Mini Cooper. The new car has nothing mechanical whatsoever to do with the old one. Other than the name and marketing niche, these cars are very much creatures of their times.
Dimensions (LxWxH): 3723 / 1683 / 1407 mm Kerb weight: 1150kg - 1185kg Fuel Economy: 6.1 l/100kms Horsepower: 1600cc / 121hp (13.22cc/hp) So the new car is: 18% longer, 17% wider, 4% lower 46% heavier all with the same mileage! courtesy of Mini. So what you've got is a much bigger car that offers all the modern amenities in addition to more space that gets about the same mileage, and it does it with an engine a third larger than the old one. Put another way, the new Mini is about twice as efficient as the old one (it uses the same amount of fuel to move almost twice as much car). On top of that Mini needs three less cc to get a horsepower out of an engine. It isn't much, but it's an improvement, unlike the bike below.
1969 Honda CB750
Dimensions
Wheelbase
L 85 in (2,200 mm) W 35 in (890 mm) H 44 in (1,100 mm) 1460mm
Here is Honda's modern ode to the CB750: The Honda CB1100A Dimensions: 1490mm wheelbase Weight: 248kgs 547lbs - wet Mileage: 41mpg Horsepower: 82.5 hp (13.8cc /hp) At 1140cc, the new Honda is 390ccs larger, though follows the same engine layout as the old CB750. They are within 3 cms of each other as far as wheelbase goes - bikes aren't significantly physically bigger in the way that four wheeled vehicles have put on weight in the past forty years, though cars seem to have done it while finding ways to get way more out of each litre of gas. That new mini is a much bigger vehicle, almost twice the size of the original in terms of mass. Bikes haven't grown anything like that, yet their mileage is pretty much the same. Keep in mind we were comparing a twelve hundred cc 1969 Mini with a 1.6l modern Mini, a 25% increase in displacement. The new CB1100 has 33% more displacement on a heavier bike and gets the same mileage as the old carbureted one. Why is the new bike so much heavier? It's not like a car - it isn't larger than the old bike, it isn't carrying airbags and all sorts of other modern safety gear other than ABS. To top it all off a carburetated 1969 CB750 used to use 10.82ccs to make a horsepower, the new one uses 13.8ccs to make a horsepower. A lot of that could be tuning the engine for more torque, but here we are, 45 years later using more displacement to make less power? What the hell is the point of fuel injection? In 45 years of material development, the new Honda is 56lbs heavier. The 1969 CB750 is within point one of a mile per gallon of the 2014 CB1100.You might say it's not a fair comparison because they're not both 750cc bikes. Honda's only current ~750cc bike is the NC750x, which is a parallel twin rather than a four cylinder. Even with that disparity the NC750x tips the scales at 483lbs, still 2 pounds more than the 1960's 750 four cylinder. And it's not like Honda isn't an engineering powerhouse. If you say the motorbike vs. car argument isn't fair, how about motorbikes to bicycles? A Tour de France bike in the 1960s weighed about 22lbs. Modern bikes are limited to 15lbs, though in 2004 Armstrong had a 14.5 lb bike and without the limit a 10lb bike is more than possible. If bicycles have dropped 30% of their mass in the last 45 years, why not motorbikes? If we look at this from an automotive/bicycle equivalent efficiency angle, the new Honda CB750 should have a 20% more efficient engine and weigh 30% less. The 2014 CB750 happy memories bike should get about 80mpg, weigh 344lbs and produce about 82hp. This bike would have a power to weight ratio of about 4.2lbs per horsepower, approaching what some of the fastest sports bikes in the world have. The sensible choice then would be to make the bike a 650cc CB throwback, which still produces a better power to weight ratio than the CB1100 and weigh even less with the smaller engine. I asked before and I'll ask again, why haven't bikes advanced at the same rate as cars (or bicycles)? Why isn't the new ode to the CB750 a CB650cc bike that produces more power, uses less gas and rides far better than its prehistoric inspiration? Motorbikes are stripped down, simple machines, in many ways still very similar to the machines made decades ago. With that in mind, why don't we see the radical evolution in technology evidenced in the Mini and in racing bicycles in the past 45 years in the Honda CB750/CB1100? If we aren't larding up bikes into SUVs (though some people are), the efficient burning of gasoline should have produced astonishingly high mileage numbers by now. Where is the direct injection? Where are the intelligent drivetrains and engine management systems that have produced cars that weigh twice as much and still burn the same amount of fuel? Where is my frictionless magnetic drivetrain with integrated brakes? Where is my kers?
With an integrated kers system, I could be riding a 400cc bike that when the kers kicks in feels like a 1000cc bike, then recharges while I ride. I could pull onto the highway or overtake on a super light bike that can feel like a one litre rocket when I need it and sip fuel like a 400cc machine when I don't.
Zero Motorcycles: all electric, but I don't know that we have to go to that extreme yet, we're not exploring internal combustion that well.
Because motorbikes are small and inherently efficient compared to cars, manufacturers haven't pushed engineering limits in the way that they have with other vehicles. I'm looking for the future of motorbiking, and it doesn't feel like manufacturers are testing limits in a way that makes my choices feel any different than they were a decade ago, let alone four.
If you follow the blog you'll know I'm on a mission to get my 2003 Triumph Tiger 955i to roll over into six figures on the odometer. I picked up the bike with under forty-K on it and have done the majority of the now high miles on it. Over that time I've had an ongoing battle with the early fuel injection on the bike, but other than that it has been my preferred ride even as a series of other bikes passed through the garage.
Once again the fueling has gone off on the bike just as I was hoping to push it over the 100k mark in its 20th year on the road. If I lived somewhere where the weather wasn't trying to kill me for four months of each year this would be an easier goal, but trying to do it in Canada where the bike has to sit through minus forty winters and then navigate the frost heaved results in our too-short riding season? It's technical a flex I'm up for, but it's a shame that Triumph isn't.
I tried the usual solution of rebalancing the fuel injectors, but the bike is still stalling out and running rough. I checked the valves less than 15k ago so that isn't likely it. If it isn't throttle body balancing, which the bike is prone to needing, perhaps it's time to, at over 90k, to finally replace the o-rings and gaskets in the fuel injection system, but Triumph tells me that the majority of these parts are discontinued.
One of the reasons I enjoy the old Tiger is that it still catches eyes and prompts conversation when I'm out and about. Another reason I like it is that it can pretty much do anything (I've trail ridden on it and done multi-thousand mile two-up road trips too). It fits me better than anything I've ridden, is fun to chuck around in corners and has handled axle deep mud when I needed it to. The engine is full of character and pulls well even two up and, considering the miles it has done, the amount of TLC needed isn't unreasonable. I'd love to keep this bike going indefinitely, it's a shame that Triumph don't feel the same way.
I had a chat with the dealer (who isn't particularly local, it's a 170 mile round trip to go there physically - I usually get parts delivered), and they said that this is a problem with Triumph - they don't support their older machines. He then went on to say I couldn't use generic o-rings because the Triumph parts are strangely size specific. I'm going to try anyway because I really want to be able to jump on my old Tiger and ride.
Suzuki runs a successful vintage parts program so I'm not sure why Triumph wouldn't want to do the same to keep their bikes on the road, especially when they lean on brand heritage marketing so much.
Here's Nick Bloor's take on it:
Never standing still, always pushing to get the best from ourselves, for our riders. Building iconic motorcycles that celebrate our past while embracing the future through bold design, original styling, purposeful engineering and a genuine passion for the ride. Always focused on delivering complete riding experience, creating bikes with the perfect balance of power, handling and style that totally involve the rider and bring out the best in them. This is our passion and our obsession. We are chasing the same thing as our riders THE PERFECT RIDE. Nick Bloor CEO Triumph Motorcycles
All good stuff, but maybe focus a bit more on celebrating Triumph's past, Nick? That includes the bikes your reborn Triumph have been making since the nineties. For some of us you created that perfect ride a while back.
When you market on brand history and provenance, shouldn't you support brand history and provenance? I'm coming at this hard because I want to believe... and keep my (not so) old Triumph rolling.
the new tires are spectacular! The old Michelins still looked ok but they were badly squared off and made the bike hesitant to turn - it drops into turns like a gymnast now!
the cosmetic touch-ups make the bike look much younger than it's 18 years and over 80k kms
the new indicators suit the bike way better and work perfectly
new horn is loud and works well
The Bad Stuff:
I've bled the front brakes and they're tight now, but after repeatedly bleeding the rears they're still not what they were, though they do now produce some stopping power. I need to check for any leaks and bleed again.
The speedo doesn't show speed! This has never been a problem before. I'm going to check the connection to the gauge because I was knocking it around and might have knocked it loose
speedo step two will be to raise the front end, remove the front tire and check how I installed the speedo unit - it only goes on one way so I'm not sure how that could be wrong but if the gauge check doesn't do anything that's the next step
The engine light is on! Though the engine feels fantastic, sounds great and the fuel injection which was problematic last year idles steady and fuels very smoothly. The simple computer in the bike sometimes needs a few runnings to clear an error after a long time unpowered (like the 99 day Canadian winter break we had this long, cold, COVID-winter)
engine light step two if it doesn't go off by itself is to connect the TuneBoy engine management system I've got and see what errors it's throwing up.
The bike goes and works better than it did in many regards before the winter-maintenance. A couple of details and it seems ready to take on another short Canadian riding season. I'm still hoping to hit 100k the year the bike turns 20 years old (2023).
Photos are all taken with a Ricoh ThetaV 360 camera wrapped around the wing mirror with a flexible tripod. The camera is set to take a photo every four seconds then I just go for a ride and see what I caught when I get back. Photos were edited in the Ricoh software and then touched up in Adobe Lightroom.
I just finished Matt Crawford's latest book, Why We Drive. This challenging read unpacks how we've backed ourselves into an intellectual dead end under tech driven surveillance capitalism. Crawford comes at it from the big-tech push to colonize one of the last moments in our lives where human skill is tested and judged by reality rather than marketing expectations, vehicular operations. Advertising companies like Google aren't trotting out self-driving cars for safety or efficiency (though that's the marketing), they're trotting them out so they can take all that consumer attention wasted on driving and advertise to it. Even with this problematic impetus and misleadingly media spin self-driving vehicles are imminent and this leads Crawford to (quite rightly) question the intent of the companies pushing them. The assumption that self-driving cars will somehow be better for us is undressed in many ways in the book.
Seeing where Matt's head is at in 2020 encouraged me to reread his first book, the bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft, which came out in 2009 in response to the market crash that everyone seems to have forgotten now as we're increasingly told we need austerity to pay back the predatory organizations who caused the debt in the first place. Running the economy is a good gig if you're one of the 'financial class' who maintain the fiction. You can crash the market and make billions of people poorer and then profit from it indefinitely as you charge interest on the loans you handed out to 'solve' the crisis you caused. It takes a special kind of stupid to buy into this.
Looking at Shop Class now years later it has historical context to it I didn't see in earlier readings where the response to the market collapse wasn't as obvious. Back then it was just timely. One of the themes that follows Matt's thinking through all three of his books is his dislike of automation. In Shop Class he talks about situated knowledge and the importance of having an intimate relationship with reality. Fundamentally, Crawford believes this vital to human beings fully developing their abilities. When we're devalued by monied interests into simplistic consumers we are unable to fully develop our human potential. Surveillance Capitalists intent on monetizing every moment of everyone's existence for their own financial advantage have coupled with safety and efficiency movements in government and society to create a brave new world of atrophied people.
I've come at this digital prejudice from an educational technology point of view on Dusty World, but it bears examining from a motorcycling perspective too. Crawford is a physicist and mechanical and electrical technician, but he seems to have drawn a hard line between digital technology and everything else. It's probably an age related thing. Matt's about five years older than I am. As I was getting into early home computers and figuring them out he was already through high school and working in his trade. I ended up heading towards IT because when I was working as a millwright I was the only one willing to take computer controlled systems on in a department full of older people who couldn't be bothered.
The idea that digital technology is opaque and unknowable is a continual professional frustration for me as a computer technology teacher. Other educators, students and parents all buy in to this opacity even while they embrace information and communication technology in more aspects of their lives. I understand the reluctance to make ourselves literate in this emerging technology, but if we're all going to use it I'd suggest we're all responsible for having at least a basic understanding of how it works or else we're going to all end up illiterate in a digitally powered world.
A bunch of smooth talking sociopaths have taken over the face of digital technologies, but I can assure you that Google, Facebook and the rest are not the limit of what digital technology can do for us. Thinking that is dangerously reductive. There was a time when the internet was newly birthed from academia and the people on it were exploring a new frontier rather than leveraging it in an Orwellian attempt to monetize our attention. I'm a digitally literate person and I have no love for them, but I get the sense that Matt truly despises computing to the point of lumping any digital tech in with the sociopaths. It's a hard distinction to make, though John Naughton does a good job of coaxing it out of author Shoshan Zuboff:
"While it is impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the digital, it is easy to imagine the digital without surveillance capitalism. The point cannot be emphasised enough: surveillance capitalism is not technology. Digital technologies can take many forms and have many effects, depending upon the social and economic logics that bring them to life. Surveillance capitalism relies on algorithms and sensors, machine intelligence and platforms, but it is not the same as any of those."
Another motorcycling angle to come at this from might be Neil Spalding's MotoGP Technology. This technical manual charts the evolution of the top prototyping class of MotoGP motorcycle racing over the past twenty years. These have been years of digital integration and management in terms of rule making and deciding how much of an influence computer assistance will have in the sport. Unlike Formula One, which many have suggested has gone too far down the technology path, MotoGP has evolved to focus on enhancing rider abilities rather than replacing them. Spalding mentions the estimate that F1 is an 80% car engineering 20% driver skill equation, where as MotoGP is the opposite. Marc Marquez winning championships on the third best bike would certainly suggest the humans operating MotoGP bikes matter more than the tech, and yet these are digital machines.
There is a point in the book where Spalding has to re-orientate the reader on how electronics work in MotoGP. Unlike what a consumer is used to, racing electronics have nothing to do with safety. Their only intent is more speed even if it means more effort and skill is expected from the rider. While everyone watching a race has only ever experienced electronic interventions (anti-lock brakes, traction control etc) as a safety blanket thrown over their incompetence, a racer only experiences them through the lens of performance. Electronic intervention on a race bike make it more extreme and harder to ride. That alone should make the true breadth of electronics and digital technology in riding a bit more clear. They are only self-driving us because someone wants them to for their own reasons, not because the tech is inherently focused in that direction.
Crawford often speaks of the mechanical work he's doing on various machines, but mechanical work doesn't end where a computer is involved. There are some parts of vehicular evolution where automation is a much needed advance. Crawford does make a point of mentioning this, but grudgingly. Reading Classic Bike Magazine a few weeks ago I came across a great article about Dr Desmo, Fabio Taglioni, the Ducati engineer who spent his career continually looking for advancements for the brand. His quote about computer controlled fuel injection is much like a MotoGP team's fixation on performance rather than protecting a rider from their own incompetence and is yet another reminder that electronic and digital technology does not have to replace human agency but can in fact enhance it.
Sorting out the Triumph's fuel injection system by finding a modified fuel map and installing it on the bike's FI computer was one of this year's most satisfying repairs.
I like getting a bank of carbs sorted out as much as the next person, and sometimes I make a point of working on bikes without electronics to distance myself from what I do at work all week (mechanical repairs offer a more immediate kind of satisfaction), but I've also had great technical satisfaction from the hybrid mechanical and electronics repairs I've had to make on the Tiger. I realize that electronics and computer based repairs are often out of the comfort zone of the home mechanic, but that's based on the kind of anti-digital prejudice Crawford carries through his philosophy. If we could all get passed that prejudice perhaps we could reclaim the digital tools we've surrendered to the attention merchants.
It's critically important we don't romanticize old technology for the same reason we shouldn't romanticize previous time periods. If you think the 1960s were some kind of magical time in human history odds are you're a heteronormative, neurotypical white male. From the point of view of the vast majority of the people on the planet the nineteen sixties were fucked, and so was much of the technology we were using back then. That time of excess and privilege has led us to the brink of disaster fifty years later. Longing to go back to it or recreate it is a kind of insanity.
This is distinct from respecting culture and engineering from a certain time period when it showed us a better way forward. I greatly enjoy working on older machines in order to keep that history alive, but if you're putting on rose coloured glasses that make you blind to the possibilities of today's technology then you're just as manipulative as the sociopaths who are destroying society for their own gain.
Crawford talks about technology that is locked and closed, like Mercedes without dipsticks to check your own oil, or electronics that are sealed to prevent 'tampering'. Corporations are able to do this because people have been convinced that digital technologies are something they can't comprehend, but this is bullshit. The companies offering to do everything for you aren't technology companies, they are advertising companies. Ignore them and ignore authors who dismiss digital technology as inherently nannying. Modern technology can just as easily be used to enhance human ability and force us to be smarter, stronger and faster as it can be used to make us stupid, docile and compliant. The issue is the intent of the people peddling it, not the tech itself.
If I can't convince you maybe Kenneth Clark's angle in 1969's award winning documentary 'Civilisation' will highlight things:
Clark's concern is that automation plays to the hands of authoritarian regimes. He couldn't see the emergence of multi-national corporations that we're now under the yoke of back in 1969, but he isn't wrong about automation playing to fascists. Crawford shares the same concerns, and they're well founded, but one of the best ways to take back control for more people is to make them literate in the technology being used to enthrall them.
All that to say don't be afraid of the digital aspects of motorcycle maintenance. This tech was made by people so you can figure it out, and in doing so you will also teach yourself to author the technology the attention tyrants are using to snow you under. From that point of view of self sufficiency and understanding of technology Matt Crawford should be on board.
Now that the CBR900RR Fireblade project is sorted and on the road, I'm finding myself doing what the original intent was in getting it: learning from a different type of motorcycle. Unlike the heavy industry Kawasaki Concours, or the SUV of motorcycling Triumph Tiger, the 'Blade was built to a different design brief. The other bikes were over engineered heavy to last, but the the Honda is a feather. That philosophy is at odds with the heavy handed git who owned it before me and managed to maintain it into such a state of disrepair that it kept it off the road for years.
From the rear brake cylinder that was assembled backwards and over tightened, to the over tight wheels and the slipping clutch I've just adjusted to actually be at spec rather than over-tightened, I'm finding the Honda was a victim of a heavy hand and unsympathetic mechanical inclination. When I was a teen my dad was talking me through a head gasket repair on one of my first cars. We weren't minted, so the only way I was driving was if I could keep an old car on the road; mechanical training was an implicit part of vehicle ownership for me growing up. As we were tightening the head back on he made a point of talking me through the bolt pattern - always tightening opposite bolts so it would seat evenly, and then said something that I've never forgotten as we started tightening down the head: "always one tight, not too tight." I guess the guy who abused this lovely piece of Honda engineering into years in a garage never got such good advice. Mechanical sympathy is an important part of maintaining any machine, but especially a motorcycle, where if you are cack-handed you can end up seriously hurting yourself when it breaks. In that way, motorcycle mechanics are a lot like aircraft mechanics, it's a do it right or it can go very wrong kind of situation. Part of that sympathy is taking the time to understand what the engineers who designed the machine want you to do in terms of looking after it. In the case of the CBR900RR, Honda would like you to leave 10-20mm of play at the end of the clutch lever - this one was set so you could strum it like a guitar string. This play is to ensure that the clutch fully disengages when you let go of it. An over tightened clutch cable means it's always set to be slightly pulling and engaging the clutch. Making it too tight isn't just a failure of the hands, it's a failure in thinking that wounds the machine. In this case, the over-tightened clutch cable explains why the 'Blade was slipping RPMs when I opened it up. A sympathetically tuned motorbike will give you a purity of interaction that allows you to more fully understand the machine. This is one of the reasons why I value technical fluency so much, it puts your ability to operate technology into focus in a way that the technically ignorant will never realize. *** Meanwhile, in the land of Tim where he's trying to keep a 17 year old European and a 23 year old Japanese bike rolling during the perilously short Canadian riding season, the Tiger's stalling when hot continues. I've ordered a replacement air idle control valve from Inglis Cycles, who have once again exceeded expectations during a pandemic by sourcing the part from Triumph in the UK and getting it to me in about a week. One of the nice things about the Tiger is that it's fuel injected, so all that carburetor management is taken care of, but the evil end of computerized fuel injection is that after seventy six thousand kilometres it's finally gone wrong, and an electronic system like that can go wrong in a lot of different ways.
I'd never gotten into the Tuneboy Software that came with the Tiger (the original owner installed it along with a Power Commander), because if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But now that it's broke, I got going on it the other evening. Getting into the bike via a computer was pretty cool. The software is Y2K retro-hip and the connection was straightforward. The 20+ pages of instructions weren't really needed (I'm handy with computers). Windows 10 automatically recognizes what you're plugging in (back in the day, WinXP would have needed drivers installed), and the software is responsive and quick to connect. It occasionally drops connection, but unplugging it and plugging it in again resolved that each time.
The compact disk (told ya, Y2K hip!) had all of the stock maps for my year of Triumph Tiger 955i engine on it, so I saved what was on there in case it was some kind of cool specialty map the previous owner had worked out (dude worked at a nuclear power plant, so don't underestimate his tech skillz), and then I flashed it with the stock numbers, which took about 20 seconds and returned a confirmed result. There is a slight lag, but otherwise this is easy to use stuff.
I then played with the diagnostics tool for a bit, hoping for some data that will help me isolate the hot idle stalling fault. The software says there are no errors (promising that this is that mechanical failure then), and the only thing that looks out of place is a strange return on the engine temperature. It seems to read accurately and then show -40, even when the fan is coming on, but if the fan is coming on and the temperature gauge on the dash is reading normally, I suspect this is something to do with how the software syncs with the on board computer rather than an actual fault, but I'm going to keep it in mind. The problem with an idle fault on a fuel injected bike is that the engine management system is taking in data from a number of sensors and using it to balance engine activity, like idling, based on that information. I've got the mechanical component that regulates idle on the bike incoming, and I hope that resolves the issue, but what I fear is that it's something else, and with these complex electronics systems could mean that anything from a dozen different sensors or relays to a loose or broken wire. With any luck, it's that idle air control valve and I'm back on the Tiger... and the Honda, just not at the same time.
