1974 XS/TX650 rebuild

[Floradawg]

A beautiful bike! What are the cylindrical parts mounted at the top of the rear shocks?

[tonyfoale]

A beautiful bike! What are the cylindrical parts mounted at the top of the rear shocks?

Air or nitrogen sealed pressure chambers. The gas pressure is to stop or reduce the tendency for cavitation in the damping oil. This is very common with any quality shocks but some incorporate the gas chamber within the body of the shock and some do it in a remote cylinder connected by a hose.

[th62]

And some of the cheaper ones are BS, just for show. Fortunately, mine are real.

[tony_hill]

Very well done! Your design concepts, even if they didn’t work still benefitted us all. I certainly learned a bit from your hydraulic clutch attempt!
Thank you for sharing your beautiful project!

[th62]

I made a fuel distributor a while back, its function was to level the fuel when the level in the tank dipped below the level of the tunnel and also to neaten things up. ,I had two online filters feeding fuel into the distributor.

The filters just kept cracking and leaking, so I decided on a combined fuel filter/distributor and this is what I came up with. The unit sits between the manifolds I made a while bike and is mounted in rubber grommets on a bracket attached to the cam chain tensioner.

The filter is sintered bronze and the body 6061. The bore is 18mm at the top to seat the filter and O ring, then expanded out to 23mm. There are three 6mm brass barbs pressed into the lower section, two for inlets for fuel, the third for purging debris. The top cap is retained by two M4 screws and is a push fit over the lower body, an O ring sits in a recess around the filter for sealing the top cap to the lower body.

Two 8mm brass barbs were pressed into the top cap and they feed the carbs via short fuel hoses. The cap is drilled 10mm underneath leading to a 5mm cross drilling which lead to the two brass barbs.

[tonyfoale]

Very neat.

[th62]

Deleted. Moving on.

[tonyfoale]

Is the compression loss equal on both cylinders?

[th62]

Yep, within two or three psi.

[olderdan]

If the piston ring gap is a little too small it can cause the ring to distort if the ends meet as it gets hot. Nothing to lose by increasing it slightly, as the rings wear it gets larger anyway. You probably gapped them to spec but the problem you have exists so worth a try?.