Vulcan done and returned

I'm a little late to getting around to posting this, but at least it's done. The carbs put up a pretty good fight during reinstallation. But lucky me, I got to do that fight about 3 times! I figured out kinda how they go in, got them in place and then realized I forgot to reinstall the choke cable. FRICK. Pulled them back out, but not completely, and got the choke cable back in (~30 mins).

Then I wrestled to get the carbs back in - again. I now had trouble getting the band clamps in place. This one time, in band clamp... oh wait.. a half hour later they were back in. SUCCESS!

Onto the air box reinstallation. These suckers came right off, but would they go back in just as easy? Hell no, of course not! The rubber snorkels needed to be fit in and until I found a trick to get them to fit right I was really frustrated. One side took about 40 minutes, the other side took about 10 mins.

The gas tank went on pretty easily - just had to attach a couple fuel lines, vacuum line, a vent line, and the electrical connection for the fuel guage.

Moment of truth - fuel switched on, pulled the choke lever, turn the key, and.......... YES! Fired right up after the gas filled up the carbs. The engine seemed nice and strong, and the bonus was that no fuel was dumping out the front header.

I did a couple of laps around the block and all the power was back and it runs like a top. I was happy to give a call to my coworker and he swung by to pick it up shortly thereafter.

The Vulcan may have won many "battles" against me by putting up a fight with those carbs and airboxes - but I consider myself the victor. If you know anyone who needs work on a VN750 Vulcan, don't mention my name.

Dirty carbs? No problem.....

Yeah - that's what I thought when I agreed to "take a look" at this problem. Actually, it appears that the float for the front carb was stuck so gas was just gushing into the cylinder and right out the exhaust valve - right onto the header!

I knew a dealer would probably charge a couple hundred bucks minimum to pull the carbs, clean, adjust and replace so I offered up my services to my co-worker. I can tackle this right? He had a service manual so this shouldn't be too bad.

Well the service manual mentions that all this stuff has to be removed including draining the coolant and removing the reservoir...yikes - uncharted territory for me.

Carbs - 1, Me - 0

After taking a closer look I realized that removing this stuff wouldn't help remove the carb - so far I'm not holding much validity with this manual. Here's the best part - the manual says to remove various hoses and cables and then "carefully remove the carburetors from the right side" HAHAHAHA!! Are they kidding? I literally spent about 2-1/2 hrs trying to get these carbs separated from the engine. What a nightmare.....

Carbs - 2, Me - 0

I finally get them off and continue reading the manual to figure out what I need to do to get to the floats. Needless to say these are the weirdest carbs I've ever seen. There are three phillips screws that need to be removed for each carb to get to the float. I got one loose, but the other two might as well have been WELDED on. I found a nice fitting bit and attempted to use my power drill to unscrew them. It has a slipper clutch so after so much force is applied, it will slip instead of stripping the screw. I would increase the applied torque after every attempt that it slipped while at the same time putting a huge amount of weight on it so it wouldn't strip the screw. At nearly the maximum amount of torque, it just completely shredded the screw head.....faaaaack.

Carbs - 3, Me - 0

No worries, Mr. Dremel to the rescue. The dremel cut-off wheel sliced through those screws like a hot knife through butter. That's right you mutha F@#@er!!

Carbs - 3, Me - 1

The carbs were cleaned out and reassembled. I went to Ace hardware and purchased some stainless steel hex-head bolts and replaced all 6 for both carbs. Never again will this be an issue.

Crap - these things hafta go back in... frick, this is gonna suck.

Here's the space...
..these carbs have to go..