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If there's anything I've learned from 9 years as a professional IT consultant, it's that blindly swapping suspect parts will often get you back up & running much faster than proper troubleshooting. (And also that computer companies will require utterly proper troubleshooting before replacing even the cheapest part under warranty. )

My carbs are as tuned as they're going to get. Since it's a '76, the only parts I could use from the rebuild kits were float valves & bowl gaskets. I replaced all the rubber I could from a Pep Boys o-ring kit, but the carb guts were a bit torn up when I got to 'em & a little more so when I was done with 'em. (Hey, I tried to be careful!) I'm a bit torn between wanting to tune the carbs for the pods & 2->1 & never looking at the damned things again, but the fact is that finding parts for '76 Keihins probably ain't gonna happen no matter what I want to do.

New battery late November, probably didn't put it in 'til January.

My girlfriend gave me a little flak about the avatar, but she knows she's the one for me & the picture doesn't mean anything. (Plus she knows she's cuter than the girls in the pic. )

Cheers, & thanks again for all the help!
-Kit

In my opinion, the number one thing to improve those carbs is to make sure the rubber plugs are in place over the idle jets. If not, they will never run right. This came up in another thread and someone mentioned you could still get these. But they are easy to make out of some neoprene tubing etc. Just something to think about the next time you're in there.

My friend and I did a lot of tweaking on those carbs to run pods. I still have the notes if you want them. It required drilling jets, though... not for the squeamish since you can't go back.

The rubber plugs are #28 on the fiche.



Post edited by: loudhvx, at: 2006/04/25 03:18

Thanks, Lou, I'd love to see your notes on that! While searching for rebuild kits for my Triumph's Mikunis, I made an amazing discovery: Cycle-Re-Cycle actually sells Keihin push-in main jets for the old KZ400 carbs!

My rubber plugs were a bit on the hard side, but still useable.

Cheers,
-Kit

...just bumping this up since Kit did such a nice job of going through the steps. I find myself pointing to this thread a lot recently since there are so many 1977 KZ650 charging questions out there, and it uses the same design as the early KZ 400 twins.

Kit, if you get a chance, maybe you can rename this thread "testing my funky charging system, yeah baby!" or something, that is, if you're not still getting swarmed by hot chicks.