GreginDenver

Nice "save" with that broken spark plug. Good job. I've seen some strange things with spark plugs. When I saw your first picture I was thinking you had a thread failure in the head and the engine spat out the spark plug (I've seen this happen on 1990s-2000s Kawasaki engines).

I didn't want to cut away material. I gave some consideration to going the Dremel route but decided to keep all of the original strength that the fairing chin insert had. I just wasn't in the right mood to start cutting on things (in the past I've done a lot of Dremel modifications to motorcycles, but so far I haven't done any to either of my 5th Gens, maybe that was a factor in today's choice). My opinion on the Dremel vs. heat-bending situation is that neither solution will leave the chin insert "speed holes" looking as good as they did in their OEM profile. So definitely go with your personal preference. Either way the fairing chin insert isn't something I notice when I look at a VFR, it's pretty much out of view from almost any angle. And if someone does notice the bent area it'll give me the perfect opportunity to bore the pants off them by telling all about my totally bitchin' stainless steel performance exhaust system.

Air conditioning systems and forced-air heating systems are convection. I'm talking about thermal radiation. Thermal radiation is one of the three principal mechanisms of heat transfer. It entails the emission of a spectrum of electromagnetic radiation due to an object's temperature. The interplay of energy exchange by thermal radiation is characterized by the following equation: In this equation represents the spectral absorption component, represents the spectral reflection component and represents the spectral transmission component (you'll note that this equation does not include anything about air or atmosphere). The type of heat transfer you keep referring to is convection, which is defined as: heat transfer due to the bulk movement of molecules within fluids such as gases and liquids. Thermal Radiation is why spacecraft need to have cooling systems in place, the Sun's radiant heat passes through the vacuum of space (no air out there) and hits the spacecraft and heats up the surfaces. Lots of heat transferred without any air involved.

I was talking about radiant heating, which occurs regardless of the atmosphere (it doesn't even need an atmosphere at all), so I'm not sure how air is factoring into your thoughts on this idea. I don't believe that the length of rubber hose linking the two radiator drains is a great conductor, but it is in close proximity to the #4 and #2 header pipes and they definitely radiate a lot of heat, so that piece of hose is almost certainly adding heat to the situation.

Today I was putting the fairings back on my '99 5th Gen for the first time after installing the "New 5th/6th Gen Header". Doing this required a bit of modification to the fairing's chin insert due to the slight mis-alignment in the design (vs. the bend of original Honda headers) of the #4 cylinder header. While doing the necessary work to accommodate this little header problem I started thinking about the hot-weather temperature behavior of my 5th Gen. I was in the process of applying some extra heat-reflecting aluminum tape to the inner surface of the fairing's chin insert as an extra effort to prevent the new headers from melting the plastic. Then, when I was installing the newly-modified chin insert into the fairings I happened to look up at the large radiator-to-radiator coolant connector tube (the one that connects the 2 radiator drains back into the bike's water pump). The idea/realization hit me that this radiator-to-radiator connector tube is probably the most unfortunate piece of engineering in the cooling system (maybe even the worst part in the entire bike?). I understand that the Honda engineers had no choice in the design because they had to connect the bike's 2 radiator drain outlets back to the water pump and they had nowhere else to go with the tube but right behind the cylinder #2 and #4 header pipes. The transfer of radiant heat from the header pipes onto this radiator drain outlet connector tube has got to be pretty substantial. The bike's right-hand radiator is trying to do its job of rejecting to the atmosphere as much heat as possible from the coolant, but then its return flow of coolant has to travel through a tube that is being actively heated by the radiant heat coming off the header pipes. This has to be a factor in the overall heat load that the bike experiences, but how large of a contribution the headers are making is an unknown at this point. So now I'm thinking about experimenting with this situation by adding a heat-reflecting Hose Shroud to cover the radiator drain connector tube. And because this product comes in a 3 foot long length (which I won't need all of that length to cover the radiator drain connector tube) I might also use the leftover length of this shroud to cover the other radiator connector cross tube, the one that connects the 2 radiator inflow ports located at the top of each radiator. While this tube doesn't pass close by the exhaust headers like the drain connector tube does, it does travel above the forward cylinder head which probably creates a pretty hot radiant heat environment, especially when the bike is moving slowly or sitting stopped. Testing my theory about the radiant heat effect of the exhaust headers will be easy as this shroud uses velcro to hold it on. So it will be easy to install it and then remove it again for comparison rides to see if it makes a noticeable difference in how the cooling system behaves.

As others have already said, I like the "new header" enough that I'm willing to live with a little inconvenience. Here are pictures of my work to provide clearance for the header from the #4 cylinder. I imitated sfdownhill's solution to the problem, I used a heat gun to soften up the plastic so it could be re-formed with an outward bend that gives the #4 cylinder's header about the same amount of clearance as the #2 cylinder's header pipe. Installed on the bike you can see that I've managed to achieve the same amount of fairing-to-header pipe clearance on both the #4 and #2 headers. I happened to have some high temperature heat reflecting tape on hand so I added it to the work I did. I figured why not, regardless of whether the situation really needed this amount of protection Maybe I got a little carried away with the heat reflective taping...

Here's one thing that is easy to check (and it's something that is known to cause exactly the problem you've described in your post) You should visually check that Part #13 is installed in the correct orientation.

Maybe there's a bit of coolant leaking, it has a distinctive smell to it when it's hot. Have a look into the "V" as best you can after a ride. Also look at the little hole on the bottom of the water pump.

I've seen a situation where after installation of a new tire the chain was slightly overtightened. This caused a vibration similar to what you're describing.

Relays are very sensitive to Grounding, a weak path-to-ground on the bike can cause relays to "chatter". Worth checking and verifying good grounding for the bike's wiring harness.

Good luck with the new-to-you VFR. I'm learning not to be so presumptuous as to suggest that your new bike might need some remedial maintenance due to it being a 21 year old bike, that sort of behavior has come to be viewed as problematic here on this forum. But I'm in the process of slowly "getting my mind right". VFRs don't need maintenance (it's true, just wait a moment and someone will be along to post about how they've never done any work and their bike's just fine).

You realize that to "ride it like it's supposed to ride" would mean doing the maintenance that Honda recommends? Do you understand that? ( Honda included a maintenance schedule in the VFR Maintenance Manual for a reason) So your advice needs to be revised to something like: "Just completely ignore all of Honda's maintenance recommendations and ride like it's not supposed to ride and have fun!" (Fixed it for you)

Owning a motorcycle is a lot like raising a child because, as the child's parent, you're pretty free to do as good or bad a job of raising them as you want. But if you've chosen to do a really lousy job raising your child it's a bit out of line to get all offended when people don't react well. Yeah, having to depend on dealership maintenance is an absolutely horrifying proposition. It's a real "gotcha" situation when you really, really, really love machinery like motorcycles but you don't have the wrench-skills (or is it skilz?) to do your own maintenance. My advice to the Original Poster on finding an alternative to Dealership Maintenance would be to do things like: Join group rides in his area and maybe go to Cars-n-Coffee type events because that's where you meet people (specifically, it's where you meet and make friends with machinery-loving people who do their own maintenance who might be willing take on your bike's maintenance).

This is a bit of a "cherry-picking" argument isn't it? Because the point you seem to believe you're making does not take into account the whole of what has been going on in this forum thread, instead your argument draws its moral-high-ground judgment from a point of view that only refers to the last few (rightfully exasperated) comments made very late in a debate. As I was just pointing out, the debate in this forum thread was not started by the "maintainers", instead, this debate was started by the "non-maintainers" jumping into maintenance-question-oriented forum threads with their anti-maintenance opinions. It seems that there are some egos among us who appear to automatically take discussions of how to do maintenance as an affront to their (imagined) internet-forum-alpha-male status. Isn't it a bit weird (psychologically) to feel it necessary to regularly intrude into discussions of motorcycle maintenance with your opinion that the maintenance shouldn't be done at all because (in your opinion) it's unnecessary?

It's nice to see responses from people who are willing to do the work to keep their bikes properly maintained, these forum threads have a tendency to start off on a productive footing, but then... the weird phenomena that this particular forum suffers from asserts itself. The discussion is quickly highjacked and diverted away from a productive question-and-answer session about maintenance into a (rather ego-charged) debate about how smart it is to refuse to simply refuse to do the maintenance. The weird VFRdiscussion.com phenomena goes like this: A forum member will post up a thread asking for advice on a maintenance-related question. A couple of people will start off the dialog with responses that address the maintenance-related question. At this point it would appear that normal progress towards a resolution is likely, but then one of the VFRdiscussion.com forum's "non-maintainers" will arrive on the scene to begin flexing his ego by making posts about how dumb it is to do maintenance on the bike. I'm thinking we might need start up a special forum thread where these guys can air out their special opinion. I'm going to suggest that we have a thread titled: "What did you not do to your VFR today?" This would be a place where the non-maintainers could regularly post about the joy and wisdom of owning a non-maintained VFR.