Pods, Tk carbs, struggles

I have a clymer manual which my buddy and followed to the T when we took the bike down to the top head gasket to replace it and every gasket putting it back together. It was running pretty good, possibly lean at high throttle. I bet oiling the pods is most of the problem.
I have only put new bowl gaskets on all 4 carbs and 1 Float valve seat and float needle from the kit in the attached picture. Are these kits the "fake" kit you talk about?

If the valves are badly out of adjustment, the carbs cannot be correctly adjusted because they will be getting faulty vacuum signals. That is why the valve adjustment should be taken care of before trying to adjust the carbs.

No mention on adjusting the valves. Those plugs are BP style plugs. They have a longer reach than stock plugs. I used them when I was fouling plugs due to bad valve guide seals. I could tell they were causing more problems than they were worth so I changed to a normal reach plug, just platinum. I doubt they are the correct heat range ether. Suggest a set of plugs, then go from there.
Steve

look up the plugs AUTOLITE #4164 or ngk d8ea

what is a BP style plug?

Start by throwing out those Autolite spark plugs; they are not the correct plugs for your bike. The recommended plugs are the NGK D8EA or the ND X24ES-U. Ed

Jonny6guns wrote:

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I have a clymer manual which my buddy and followed to the T when we took the bike down to the top head gasket to replace it and every gasket putting it back together. It was running pretty good, possibly lean at high throttle. I bet oiling the pods is most of the problem.
I have only put new bowl gaskets on all 4 carbs and 1 Float valve seat and float needle from the kit in the attached picture. Are these kits the "fake" kit you talk about?

The ones I found had no label, but the box looks suspiciously similar.
home.comcast.net/~loudgpz/GPZweb/TK22mai...TK22rebuildKits.html

Did you spot the warning in the manual about the tensioner when installing the valve cover?

kawi810 wrote: what is a BP style plug?

Here's the difference between the two. The BP's have a longer reach.
Steve

Loudhvx,
Yes I did catch that about the tensioner. I did the gaskets last fall and have been riding the bike this year to and from work, about 3 miles, with the choke about half on to prevent from running lean. I haven't had trouble until now, when I oiled the pods and checked the float levels to start the process of seeing if I need to jet it, raise the needle etc....
I just cleaned the oil of the pods and bought new plugs I hope to see what that does sometime today.

Jonny6guns wrote: Loudhvx,
Yes I did catch that about the tensioner. I did the gaskets last fall and have been riding the bike this year to and from work, about 3 miles, with the choke about half on to prevent from running lean. I haven't had trouble until now, when I oiled the pods and checked the float levels to start the process of seeing if I need to jet it, raise the needle etc....
I just cleaned the oil of the pods and bought new plugs I hope to see what that does sometime today.

Ok good. Then how about a compression test? You don't want to spend a lot of time messing with the carbs and then later find it was really an engine problem.

I have had very good luck with the NGK D8EA's, even though others seem to like the ND's. The NGK's are much easier to find locally, for me.

As far as jetting goes, my buddy's KZ550A (same motor as yours) ended up using the stock jets and the stock needle, but we had to shim the needle to .6mm. We used a wideband to get it really precise. It was precise enough to show the that a 0.5mm shim was not quite rich enough. So it may sound absurd that a .1mm thickness makes a difference, but with these TK22's, the factory needles (and good factory replacement needles) make a lot of difference on the jetting due to the two-stage taper.

On his bike, we had excellent compression, new intake manifolds to eliminate the vac leaks, of which there were several with the old cracked manifolds, we replaced all of the fuel valves to get reliable fuel levels, but we ended up using the stock jets, and stock needle (after we tossed the defective replacement needles).

We used the same disposable paper pods you have, (but used totally dry). So the only real difference would be exhaust. We had a Mac 4-into-1 which is not the best breathing system out there. (It breathes a lot at lower RPMs, but at the top end, it doesn't, which is probably why we ended up using the stock main jet. We also restricted the muffler slightly by reducing the internal baffle pipes' diameters, just to get it to sound less annoying at idle.)

My site has a page dedicated to shimming the needle properly. It shows how to properly support the slide mount.

One thing is, when using the factory needle, or the factory adjustable needle, if you lift the needle by more than a full clip (1mm), you end up moving the lean cruising range of the needle to a higher throttle position. Normally you want lean cruise at around 1/16 to 1/8 throttle. A .5mm shim might move that out to about 3/16 throttle. A full clip (1mm) might move it out to about 1/4 throttle. At 1/4 throttle, you may be getting close to 100mph in top gear, so you don't really want to be lean there, thus it will force you to have to compensate with the main to mask the lean area. This will make you a little rich in other areas. This is not a big problem, and the bike will run fine, but the mileage will suffer and you might get darker plugs than you'd like.

Here is a pic of the new plugs after idling ruff tonight. I have not done a compression test yet. Would poor compression show up out of the blue, and cause a stall when it was running good for the last year?
By the way I have a 4 to 2 exost.

Valve adjustment? :whistle:
Steve