Now this wasn't fun
Posted by Seacat on Jul 23, 2008; 1:57am
URL: http://vintage-and-classic-hondas.81.s1.nabble.com/Now-this-wasn-t-fun-tp457845.html
On Saturday I decided to take the bike to work. On the ride to work everything was going fine until about a mile from work. That's when I noticed two things. The first was my right hand turn signal wasn't flashing although both lights were coming on. The other was I had a loss of power. The bike seemed to straighten out at the light and off we went. We arrived at work without any more problems.
After work we headed for home. Maybe two miles from the parking garage the bike lost power then died. At first I thought I had run out of gas even though I only had 59 miles shown on the trip odometer. I shifted to reserve and cranked the bike without results. I started looking the bike over, checking all of the electrical I could find and cranking the bike every time I adjusted something. Finally the bike fired and we were able to run home even though the bike ran rough and seemed to be missing a lot of power. The only thing was, at high RPM's the bike ran just fine.
Once we got home and parked the bike we changed and took some cool showers. Afterwards I was back out at the bike. I got it running again although it ran rough as hell. After letting it run like this for a few minutes I shut it down and did a simple test. I checked the pipes at the heads. Pipes 1, 2 and 3 were hot. Pipe 4 was still cool which told me that cylinder wasn't firing.
Because of the way this presented I had a feeling it was electrical.
Today I dragged my butt out to the bike and started checking things over. I went to pull the plug on number 4 and found it to be loose. Loose hell, the blasted thing was barely threaded into the well. I removed it with my fingers. When I looked at it the plug was black and wet. It did have a spark though.
I didn't trust the plug so I replaced it with a new one and fired up the bike. It fired on the first crank and while it ran it ran rougher than hell. I was also seeing a lot of heavy smoke out of the exhaust. Not a good sign. I slowly packed up my tools as I let the bike idle. Slowly it smoothed out and the smoke disapeared. I shut it down and went inside for a bit.
Later this afternoon I again fired up the "Beast". This time it fired nicely and ran smooth from the beginning. No smoke was coming from the exhaust as I let it idle.
Tomorrow morning I'll be taking it down to the local station and refilling the tank with nice new gas and letting that run through the system for a bit. Then I'll pull the plug on number 4 and see what it looks like.
I'm curious how that plug loosened up like that.
Cat