Picked up this cheap and cheerful bike on Monday night. Its been neglected for many years, but I’ve got it sorted now. Sandblast and new exhaust paint. New rear tyre. Major carb clean, the most varnish I have ever seen. Plastidiped wheels. Got WOF and rego. Ordered new filters and brake pads from Korea. Changed fork oil to 10wt and added preload spacers. Ordered new handle bars from China. Looking pretty good.
A video of todays ride
Here’s a video of my ride today.
V Strom still has issues
So, after last weekends issues, and some good advice, I decided that the problem running issues were most likely caused by a non venting fuel cap. It made perfect sense to me. I removed the fuel tank cap yesterday and dismantled. Apart from some superficial corrosion and some water, it all seemed OK. I reassembled and took the bike out for a test ride today. All seemed ok at first, until after about an hour of fairly fast riding the same issue appeared again, low power, unresponsive at wide open throttle at high RPM, just like it is starving for fuel. Once again I was near a petrol station, so I did the same as last time, pulled in and topped off the tank. Once again, all the issues went away again. Interestingly enough it took almost exactly the same amount of fuel as last time, 8.7 litres. I’m now completely baffled as to what the problem is. I’m going to ride the bike for a bit because I am fed up with working on it. The next thing I will probably do is do a fuel pump flow test with less than 10 litres fuel in the tank.
Protected: VStrom Video
Bye Bye Xin2
A bit of a sad day today. We had to put one of our cats down. He was 17 years old had hyperthyroid problems, kidney problems and had been steadily losing weight. Over the last week he stopped eating and was vomiting a lot and there was blood in it. He became very lethergic and struggled to do anything.
We agonised about what to do for a few days and Ange decided it was time to put him out of his misery.
We took him to the SPCA this morning. It’s the first time I have witnessed an animal being put to sleep and it was all very gentle and kind. Seemed really odd that I could see almost the exact moment that his life left him and his pupils dialated.
We hope he has gone to cat heaven.
Is the VStrom really fixed?
Took it for a test ride and there was a significant improvement in performance, a lot smoother at small throttle openings. I was feeling relieved that finally the bike was as Suzuki intended it to be. Then after a couple of KMs of slow riding at 50km/h the bike started behaving badly, intermittent power delivery at small throttle openings, so bad I thought it was going to stop. It felt similar to the fuelpump flow issues I experienced earlier. I pulled into a petrol station and even though the fuel gauge said I had 3/4 of a tank, I topped it off. It took 8.9 litres, so definitely wasn’t about to run out. After filling the tank everything went back to normal. All running perfectly. I am now wondering what all that was about? Does the fuel tank level have any effect on the amount of fuel pumped? I wouldn’t expect it too, but one of the fuel pump tests specified a large amount of fuel in the tank. I’m going to do another fuel pump flow test later.
DL650 VStrom Injectors are Installed
I installed the new fuel injectors today. Took me three attempts to finish the job properly. In fact the whole thing was a pain in the arse.
The front hose clamp that holds the air box to the throttle body is a bitch to get at and was SUPER tight. I ended up removing the air box without disconnecting it, then still couldn’t get the hose clamp undone, so I used my Dremel thingy to cut the hose clamp screw. What a pain.
I replaced the injectors, reassembled and discovered that I hadn’t put the rear cylinder injector in properly so fuel leaked everywhere.
Disassembled again and corrected that, reassembled and got C49 error code. I disassembled yet again and discovered I had forgotten to plug in one of the many sensors. So yet again I had to disassemble, plug the sensor in and reassemble yet again.
Finally it’s all done. The weather was rubbish so I didn’t get a chance to test ride, but it did start and run well.
Fingers crossed when the weather improves and I can test ride it and there is some improvement.
The VStrom Fuel Injectors have Arrived!
Good News!
The new injectors arrived yesterday.
Todays mission is to install them.
The weather is terrible today, so I will need to try and make some space in my garage so I can work under cover.
Looking at the teeny tiny holes in the nozzles of the new injectors, I reckon the old ones must be constricted or partialy blocked, so this should show a good performance increase.
Server Issues
This last week has been quite challenging. Last weekend I managed to pretty much ruin my servers php installation. I wanted to serve video files in WordPress that had been directly uploaded to the server rather than being constrained by WordPress’ maximum media upload size limitations. To do this I installed a plugin. This plugin required a newer version of PHP. I tried to upgrade PHP and broke the LAMP stack. I couldn’t figure out how to roll back to the old version, and that wasn’t ever going to be a solution as I still wanted to use the plugin.
I’ve had some “new” hardware sitting around unused (used to be a gaming computer) that I had been planning to use for an upgrade to my server for ages, so the catalyst was me breaking the old installation.
A week of feverishly working on the new server has now paid off! I have a super fast server, core i7, 8gb DDR3 RAM, Intel SSD for OS (now Ubuntu 16.04 LTS), and 4TB data storage.
All the websites and other data have been migrated across. Samba, proftpd, Minecraft server, Zone minder etc have been set up.
The old server will probably end up in my garage as my workshop computer as it’s still way better than the old Pentium 4 that I have in there at the moment.
The V Strom Fuel injectors are on their way!
The nice eBay vendor in America (Martha), agreed to ship me the genuine Suzuki fuel injectors. They have left today via USPS priority mail.
Thanks Martha!
DL650 Fuel injectors
I’m now starting to wonder whether the V Strom is running right. Maybe it’s just my paranoia, but it doesn’t seem to make a lot of power at high RPM with WOT. Maybe I’m expecting too much from it and have been spoiled by the massive output from the CB1300. I’m thinking that if it isn’t a figment of my imagination then it’s likely that the injectors are partially blocked and the spray pattern is not right. Cleaning wasn’t very effective with the fuel pump, so I’m thinking new might be best. Diesel and Turbo want $60 per injector to clean and flow test, but I’m wondering if for a little more money I can just get new ones. Suzuki New Zealand are asking $286 per injector, ouch! I found a pair of new ones in the states on Ebay for US$120, but they wont ship to New Zealand. I found a couple of vendors on Aliexpress and one says that they have the right injectors in stock. Most of them are priced at US$20 with free shipping. I’m now waiting for them to list them so that I can place an order. I’ll post back when/if I manage to get, install them and test. The photo below is from an Aliexpress vendor and they say this is the right one. Looks the same to me (apart from the colour), but I do wonder about the nozzle sizes and spray pattern etc. I know nothing about injectors!
The V Strom Lives!
We finally got the V-Strom DL650 going and registered! Needed the fuel tank rust cleaning out with hydrochloric acid, new fuel pump, new low pressure inlet side fuel filter, new high pressure fuel filter and pressure regulator. The high pressure fuel filter is hidden in part of the fuel pump housing and not visible! Sneaky Suzuki engineers had me going for ages with that one. I’ll post a whole lot of photos of the process. Over 40 hours spent so far, but worth it to get an old but brand new bike for a reasonable price.
