baraka

Hello fellow VFR Enthusiasts! Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was on a long meandering ride from Rochester NY to Philadelphia PA. It was unseasonably cold and my clutch fluid was probably low (yeah, I'm that guy who embarks on major road trips without checking all the vital fluids, I was young, and adventurous). Somewhere on the Delaware River I suddenly stopped getting response from my clutch. So I popped the old girl into neutral and coasted into a nearby NAPA. God smiles on fools. Over the course of the next four hours, I did my first clutch bleeding on the side of the road with my handy dandy underseat toolkit and a new bottle of brake fluid. I don't remember everything that happened, because it was a pretty wild four hours of improvisation, but I used a handy iPhone and this forum and a few others and nothing was working. Like most of the clutch maintenance/bleed threads, I was pumping and pumping the clutch handle and getting nowhere. Eventually I found a thread where someone had a little trick that I was desperate enough to try, and I tried it, and it worked. So naturally, now that I'm rebuilding my master cylinder, I went to find that thread and couldn't. But it worked beautifully, so I figured I'd post it here for two reasons: 1. Nobody should have to go through the misery of bleeding this damn thing and getting nowhere 2. Maybe it's a really bad idea and someone can explain why. In short, I rebuilt the master cylinder, bench tested it to make sure it built pressure, reattached it to the handlebar, banjo bolted it in, and pumped it until I was getting fluid at the slave cylinder bleed port. At this point, no matter how many times I pumped and bled, pumped and bled, I was developing no significant pressure. This is where the fun begins - I undid the three bolts that hold the slave cylinder into the motorcycle, and pumped until the slave cylinder was pushed out as far as it goes. At that point, I squished the slave cylinder piston back into the slave cylinder with my thumb, resulting in a huge, audible bubble of air coming out of the reservoir on the handlebar. I did this three or four times until the bubbles were much smaller. Pump the handle until the slave cylinder is all the way expanded, then manually push the cylinder back, resulting in burping and bubbling from the reservoir. Once I was only getting small amounts of bubbles out, I reinstalled the slave cylinder, and was able to get serious resistance at the clutch lever and actually build up enough pressure to successfully bleed at the bleed valve on the slave cylinder. I've done this twice now on my VFR, and I can't find any other source online documenting this technique, so I figured I would share it here for wiser heads to determine if it's a good technique, if there's any way this could damage by slave or master cylinders, or maybe help some poor schmuck stuck on the side of the road out. I was working under pretty primitive conditions last night so I don't have any pictures, unfortunately. Instead, here's a picture of my last really bad idea so you can comprehend the general level of redneckery I'm comfortable with during maintenance procedures: Cheers!

Absolutely! Itinerary so far is: Day One: Thousand Islands Parkway from Toronto to Montreal Day Two: Follow the Saint Laurent as far north out of Montreal as we can in a day...hopefully deep into coastal New Brunswick. Need to find some camping up around Matine/Lac Matapedia/Saint-Anne-De-Monts Day Three: Cut across to Dalhousie and follow the coast down into Moncton for a weekend of wedding festivities and day trips around Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia! Regression: as far down US-1 through Maine and New England as I can get before running out of vacation time and gas money! Then back to Pennsylvania!

It's been years since I've had a chance to visit Canada! I'll be in the Toronto area in June for the Horizon's Unlimited Meetup, and then heading out to New Brunswick for a wedding. Very excited to see parts of Canada I've only dreamed about! My loose plan is to take three days to head east from Toronto to Moncton, spend the weekend in and around Moncton and hopefully check out Nova Scotia, and then head back to Pennsylvania through the states. I'll be traveling light and camping, hopefully avoiding boring slabbing on highways and seeing beautiful scenic country and nice twisty roads. I've never been in those parts before: if anyone has any recommendations on good roads to ride, places to camp, sights to see, and amazing food to eat, that would be awesome! Dan

Strip off the soaked clothes, sit next to a fire, drink an adult beverage and feel superior to all those fair weather birds who melt in the rain?

She hasn't gotten back to me with pictures. Email only so I'm waiting on a reply.

Excellent points! I am mainly tempted by being able to pick this up for a song. Didn't know about the tires/chains, and recent experience teaching a friend how to ride has made me re-evaluate the "buy an old bike that you don't mind dropping" notion. Maybe it would be better to "buy a bike with decent suspension and brakes that feels more controllable for a beginner." I love the Ninjas and Honda 250's, but this looked like an interesting, and much cheaper, option. I have to say I have been dying for an excuse to buy a CBR250R. They are dead sexy. I need to take one out for a test drive. I really really want a Repsol replica one, but I can't justify the cash for it right now. Especially if a new rider's going to be on top of it :)

I was hunting Craigslist and I found a VFR250 from 1988. The seller is asking US$900 (I'll, of course, offer less) and says it needs the alternator to be replaced, but says it runs. Any thoughts? I'm interested in picking of a bike for a 5'04 female friend to learn to ride on. Good idea, or bad idea? http://atlanta.craigslist.org/atl/mcy/4099542839.html

Well. Update for the troops: I am back on the road after fixing three things: 1. New grounding line to the front wiring harness, to fix the poor ground in the ignition circuit. 2. New power line run to front high beams, and extraneous loop cut out of front wiring harness. 3. New ignition pulse (or crankshaft position sensor) and bolt. The old one's mounting bolts had vibrated out and were chilling out in the oil pan. :( But, :), they were not chewed up. Much thanks to all who helped trouble shoot, and PoniesAteMyBagel and Tightwad for timely help with parts.

What he said.

Well, I was homeschooled in a family of electrical engineers, so dinner table conversations often involved actual usage of voltmeters...I definitely called up dad a few times during this little project. He spends his spare time fixing household appliances and stubbornly refusing to let anybody else fix his cars. Good resource to have, because this stuff gives me headaches.

Well here is the crazy thing. I snipped it all out except for the small red and white wire, which I snipped where it joined in with the other red/whites. I wired a new, 8 gauge ground wire from the frame to the front wiring harness and commoned it with all the grounds. It's a good thing I saved most of that little red/white wire, because that is the power feed for the high beams. It runs to a small 20A feed, and from there to a black/red or black/yellow wire to the high beam relay. I have no idea how the high beams were powered before I took this whole thing apart, as I cannot find any other wiring that was wired into that loop. I can only chalk it up to witchcraft. The recall is on the books as having been done. But the wiring harness is kind of bizarre, and the vfrness doesn't fit the R/R connector. The three yellow wires are connected using a three pin connector. I looked at the recall wiring schematic, and it has a red/white tied into the main red/white in between the 20A master fuse and the regulator/rectifier. So I found a convenient spot on the wiring harness side of the regulator/rectifier plug and button hooked the red/white power feed to the high beams into one of the large gauge red/white wires and crossed my fingers and called it a day, under the theory that both red/whites attached to the R/R are commoned on the schematic, and I am mimicking the recall wiring harness schematic, and there is a twenty amp fuse on both sides of the connection. Nothing has lit itself on fire yet... My only concern is that I am somehow altering the delicate RR/Stator balance and will begin over/undercharging the battery. I will run some voltmeter tests shortly. The other problem I have is, the connector with three yellow wires looks to be an aftermarket three pin, and won't mate up properly with the VFRNess, so I haven't decided how to proceed there.