The RC46 story

Image credit  gabitzu79 We get used to our bikes letting us know they have a problem when they vomit their guts up over the back tire so when the dash board starts blinking at you, you are faced with a mix of annoyance at a new problem but relief that you aren't pushing a dead bike back home just yet. The PGM FI unit lets you know it is having bother by leaving the FI light on when the ignition is switched on. To find out the problem you just flick the side stand out and it will blink a code at you in a series of dashes and dots (long and short blinks). The dots are worth 1 and the longer dashes are worth more (I don't have my Haynes manual to hand to give you values, I had a look online and there is allot of bad advice on there from VTEC owners who have a different setup). With this information at hand you can refer to your trusty Haynes manual and pointing you in the general direction of the fault. I initially misread this error code as an injector not working pr...

One of the first tasks I normally perform on a new (to me) bike is to balance the carburettors. This is one of those jobs that never seems to get done as you need specialist tools but can make quite a difference in the day to day running of the bike.  "But wait Gavin, that's an injected motorcycle" I hear you cry. Well this is true but you can still balance the throttle bodies and mine are all over the place.  When I first purchased this bike, the tick over was up at 3.5k rpm when warm. I bottomed out the idle screw and had to also wind back the whole throttle body plate in order to get it near to the 1.5rpm correct idle. Now this might have had something to do with the bike massively over compensating for having a mouse house in the airbox  but with that small obstruction removed I knew the throttle body balance would be out after my fiddling. The first thing obstructing me from doing this right in the first place was that I had lent my carb gauges to a...

 I have never been a fan of coloured screens. It was a big fad with the Gixers to put blue screens on them and I hated it. So despite the fact that in some pictures this screen looks okay I still wasn't a fan. I have had double bubble screens in the past and suffered with melted clocks as a result of them focussing sun light into a clock killing death ray. A quick fix is to wedge a bit of card or your gloves into the bottom of your screen when you park up outside but better still you can paint the inside of the screen at the bottom. A more permanent and elegant solution that I did to my CBR600 FX. As it happens, Powerbronze screens come pre painted and have a nice VFR logo on them. So, as I had accumulated allot of Nectar points, I spent them on a new screen on eBay. The screen is held in by the mirror stems and a cover on the inside of the  front fairing. On the old screen there is also a clip that fits into a slot in the fairing and is slid down to lock it in place and ...