Hey everyone, thanks for the add to the forum.
I picked up a 98 last Feb. after dreaming about it for months. Got a pretty sweet deal (so I thought) on a cream and red tourer with the cobra 6 into 6 exhaust. Only paid $4200 for her and she only had 30,000 miles. I therefore had originally thought the price, in part, reflected the fact that I was buying in the off season (I live in NYC, picked it up on Long Island, and rode it back to the city in 27 degree F. weather - happy as a clam, of course
).
However, once summer rolled around and the weather changed, so did the performance of the bike. It feels down about 20-30% on power and, although I dont know forsure whether this can be chalked up to a change in air density or my getting used to the power, I have come to the hypothesis that the larger jets he put in it are running rich in the warmer conditions.
He told me that when he put the cobras on, it "ran like crap," so he put in 105 mains and 38 pilot jets. In the process, he broke his self-made slots on the D-shaped mixture screws on cyl #4, couldn't fix it himself, gave up on the whole tuning process and sold it to me (under weather conditions in which it DID run well) without telling me.
I have now fixed this issue and have been fighting to get a good tune ever since. I have the mixture screws synced up using the EGT methods posted elsewhere on this forum and I have the carbs synced with a digisync. The engine sounds much happier, but alas, I cant get that original power back.
Right now im thinking that I cant lean out the pilot screws enough to improve the mains without starving the bike of fuel in the other circuits. But before I go buying other jets, I wanted to consult the greatest resource of knowledge for any bike out there: the valkyrie forum.
I am only 3 years older than the bike itself so it has been a wonderful learning process and I couldn't have gotten this far without the in-exhaustive database y'all have compiled here - so thank you. This forum ads great value to these bikes.
On that note, what jet sizes have people found success with using the cobras? Are there ways of finding out the mixture on the main and pilot circuits without a dyno or exhaust analyzer?
TL;DR (too long didn't read):
I think the bike is running rich on 105 mains and 38 pilots. What jet sizes have people found work well with the cobra 6 into 6 exhaust? Are there ways of finding out the mixture on the main and pilot circuits without a dyno or exhaust analyzer?
