Idle drops when shifting from neutral to first

I think tonight I’ll sit myself down and give me a good talking to.

Okay, now I'm pissed off. Haha!

I cleaned and bench synced the carbs, which is no difficult task. And then I checked the cylinder compression which looked good. All cylidners were exactly at 120 psi when cold.

BUT then I put the carbs back on the bike and hooked up the gas with the fuel filter and tried to start the bike. And then I tried again... for about 15 minutes I tried a bunch of different things so I decided to check the float levels. All in perfect position - except I could see debris in the fuel!! wtf!

There was gas leaking out of the 4th cylinder air filter (again) so the float is getting stuck. I could not get the bike to turn over at all. It just kept clicking from the electric start

Okay, but you've established a baseline. 120 psi cold is good. Your floats are within spec. Likely your valves clearances while maybe not perfect aren't affecting compression or vacuum. Crap in the carbs you can deal with. How's the inside of the tank look?

That bike should at least try to start. You checked to see that you still have spark right?

That's electronic ignition I gather?

What I'm getting at is that if you have done everything properly and it sounds like you've been careful, then now you know what it's not so you can move on to the other possibilities. It's easy to focus on what you are doing and forget to plug something else back that is not a part of the immediate task at hand. I did it myself today.

There could be quite a lot of crap in the fuel lines and tees located south of the filter. It doesn't all magically disappear because there it's a fuel filter installed.

Double check that the sparkplug wires are hooked up correctly. 1&4, 2&3.
Check that the kill switch is in the Run position.

The spark plugs are hooked up correctly, I have good voltage from the battery, I don't know how to check the spark plug spark, but they're practically brand new plugs (about 100 miles on em). All thee vacuum lines are hooked up correctly. Float levels are good and not overflowing anymore. The starter motor cranks the engine but it just won't turn over at all. I'm wondering if maybe my plugs need to be torqued down harder? I didn't want to over torque them so I made them just snug.

And yes, it's electric ignition. I don't have a kick start on it or anything.

dpivas7 wrote: .................... All thee vacuum lines are hooked up correctly. ................

It might help if you could post a picture of the vacuum lines. I don't know why there would be more than one of them. Ed

So I noticed that the negative terminal on my battery sparks when I try to start it sometimes. It only sparks if the key is turned from off to on, and then that first time I press the electric start button. Every time after that, it doesn't spark.