Wired

After the chugging, sputtering sluggish response I endured near the end of my prior ride I was a little concerned about the bike.  It had seemed like the bulletproof K may have something more than a flesh wound.

I pulled the plugs and checked them. Not bad but not great either.  A bit on the rich side for cylinders 3&4. So I thought maybe I was not getting good air flow. I replaced the air filter & fuel filter since I really wanted to make sure all the maintenance was current anyway.

While inspecting the spark plug wires I noticed that the wires were looking a bit ragged so I got a new set of silicone NGK wires and bought new plugs too. I remember someone once advised me to factor in 20% of the price of a new bike to fix all the hidden problems . So I was still well within 20% of the sale price while bringing all of the critical maintenance up to snuff. And I was well below the $1300 the dealer estimated to fix the bike.

While replacing the air filter ( a real knucklebuster of a task) I also noticed that there were a few air hoses that looked cracked.  I replaced them and tighted all of the lines to make sure was minimizing air inleakage.

So when I fired it back up everything seemed great again. Good smooth pulling power, no issues at idle or high speed and the herky jerky throttle response seemed  behind me. I had fresh fuel, with a little splash of Techron added, fresh filters, and all new hoses. What could go wrong now?

I went out for a short ride and all was good. Commuted to the office the following week without any issues and felt I had the problem licked. On Friday, on my ride home from the office I ran into more slow traffic and hot Atlanta weather.  As I started to slow down,  approaching an intersection,  the engine started sputtering again and became real sluggish. As I rolled on more throttle it started to die.  I started pulling off the road. Then it regained some life, and I pulled back into the lane and made it home. Rats. Another issue to resolve.