It was a VERY snowy winter. Like I remember from childhood, and the type we have not had for some time. Sadly, we have rolled straight into a very wet spring. The only upside to that early on was it cleaned all the crud off the roads.
Middle of April I uncovered the S2R, unplugged the battery tender, rolled out of the garage, turned the key and pushed the starter... and the bike fired up like I'd just ridden the day before. Sweet. I checked lights and adjusted tire pressure and then went out for a 40 mile spin. And it was good.
<insert more rain here>
The following weekend I run the same drill with the ZRX and once again, the bike starts right up. Startron and battery tenders, baby. But this time, my son points to the exhaust and all of the thick white smoke pouring out. I thought maybe it was some condensation in the pipe for the first few seconds, but very quickly I could smell the oil, from my 4-stroke.
Well this can't be good.... Did I lose a gasket or something over the winter? So I made a service appointment thinking it was time for new brakes anyway. I'm walking out to the bike with a mechanic as I describe the problem and he says "Look at your (oil) sight glass, the case is full of gas." And processing that information I respond "Huh?"
There is no off position with the fuel petcock and I guess whatever function of the vacuum advance is supposed to prevent fuel from leaving the tank, didn't. So it was moving down through the carbs, past the pistons an into the engine all winter.
Replace the petcock, tune-up, clean the carbs, replace the floats, change the oil in the very clean case, sync the carbs ... 5 hour$ labor. Turns out he thought the brakes looked okay
There was a long enough break in the rain to allow me to meet up with a bunch of guys the following Sunday and put 170 miles on running the northern route. Had a blast.
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