Y'all will remember I bought a 1999 Triumph Trophy 1200 a week or 2 ago. Got a good discount because there were some engine problems and it actually wouldn't start when I bought it.
Managed to get it started and committed to running it for a little while before I did anything else. Been riding it to work this week (50 miles one way), first off the freeway and then on. Tuesday morning was 37 deg F (Brrrr) in the morning and a couple of the afternoons have been around 70. Have a problem with stalling at intersections and then occasional bucking at around 4000 rpm (about 70 mph). Seems to be much worse when cold and a little choke sometimes makes a difference. But overall, it's been OK.
Turns out that a guy I work with is a Triumph mechanic (sometimes I love this business). He had me over to his house Thursday and we tore into the engine. A couple of interesting problems. The first was that the petcock diaphragm was stuck so it never turned off. He had a spare valve laying around so we replaced the diaphragm.
Also, the guy that had it had disconnected the Evaporative emission stuff (no biggy) and had broken one of the vacuum nipples on a carburetor cap. He had fixed it by putting a screw in the hole and running the vacuum line off another carb. Turns out he routed it wrong. The vacuum needs to come off the third carb which is the primary which is the cap he broke. Not having another cap, we temporarily fixed it with a rivet and a small pice of tube but I've now got another cap on order. Swapped the broken cap to an easier to access carb and hooked up the vacuum the way it should be. Then we got out the gear and balanced the carbs.
Put it all back together and now it's running better but still just a little cantankerous. I've been messing with the idle speed knob and it's pretty good now. Will still occasionally stall while sitting at a light.
Put some Gumout cleaner in the tank (sorry poppygene, I was in Walmart and that's what they had) and I'll see if that improves things. If there are other issues, we'll go back into it. This guy has a 1999 Triumph Daytona 1200 that had similar issues. He finally found it was a coil. Maybe that's where we'll go next.
So far I'm out $20 for the diaphragm. The rest of the work is "fun time".
More updates as we go.