fuel reserve switch(petcock)

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iwannadie · #1 Unread post by **iwannadie** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 9:08 am

ive always wondered why they put the fuel reserve switch in such weird places. mine isnt all that bad right now its a big knob on the side by my knee, my last bike it was down under the seat.

ive been reading about the Vmax it has it right on the handle bars. why hasnt anyone else put it on the bars? its a major pain i think when your riding and the bike stails from no gas and having to try to get to the switch with your clutch hand. at the very least why not put it on the right side so you can switch it while holding the clutch in?

TechTMW · #2 Unread post by **TechTMW** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 9:47 am

Anyway, the vmax has a fuel pump because of the unorthodox location of the fuel tank - so you can control that remotely. Gravity, however does its own thing, and on bikes w/o a fuel pump, you pretty much gotta put the fuel valve under the tank.

Why the left side? Well, better to have a hand on the throttle so you can goose it if you need to. If you get in troubble and your throttle hand is ... somewhere else, you might become road pancake.

iwannadie · #3 Unread post by **iwannadie** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 2:33 pm

TechBMW wrote:Anyway, the vmax has a fuel pump because of the unorthodox location of the fuel tank - so you can control that remotely. Gravity, however does its own thing, and on bikes w/o a fuel pump, you pretty much gotta put the fuel valve under the tank.

Why the left side? Well, better to have a hand on the throttle so you can goose it if you need to. If you get in troubble and your throttle hand is ... somewhere else, you might become road pancake.

ok but i dont see why you couldnt have the fuel valve where it traditionally is. but rig up a way to switch it from some where else. a wire going to the valve would be enough to do that. at least go from on to reserve.

BuzZz · #4 Unread post by **BuzZz** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 5:52 pm

iwannadie wrote: ok but i dont see why you couldnt have the fuel valve where it traditionally is. but rig up a way to switch it from some where else. a wire going to the valve would be enough to do that. at least go from on to reserve.

Mechanical complexity, for one thing, probably cost for another.

I wouldn't like it on the rightside, if the bike is stuttering and farting as it runs out of fuel, I would want my hand on the throttle, not the clutch. Pull in the clutch just then, and the bike will probably die. Then you have to pull over to re-start it, or at least become an unpowered target in the middle of a lane.....

My FJ has the 'reserve' switch on the upper fairing panel, but it's got a fuel pump too.

blair · #5 Unread post by **blair** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:22 pm

The whole concept of a "reserve" is bogus. Most (if not all) are just two different feed points in the same tank, and "running out of gas" in the normal setting is supposed to give you a sense of urgency about finding gas before the reserve setting runs dry.

If the tank just had a visible gauge or sight-glass or something, none of this would be a problem, and John Denver might still be alive.

(Yeah, I know it was a plane, not a bike, but same stupid system.)

iwannadie · #6 Unread post by **iwannadie** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:34 pm

i know alot of people that run on the res setting, is there any problems with that, is the feed the same. i herd you can get alot of settlement from the bottom of the tank if you run on reserve all the time also.

my bike has a gauge but no idea how accurate it is. it seems to basically have a 3 position range on it not a real gauge from what i can tell ha. but its a good indicator to know how low i am getting rather than the motor cutting out.

blair · #7 Unread post by **blair** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:48 pm

If sediment was a problem, it would be a bigger problem every time you switched from ON to RES and all the gunk that had collected in the non-flowing reserve portion of the tank during the first 4/5ths of the trip was dumped into the filter.

It's just a bad design choice that's been perpetuated for whatever reason people perpetuate bad design choices.

But then, motorcycles are designed deliberately to fall over. As Thoreau said, "man has become the tool of his tools", and it's something we just have to do to communicate with our machines.

Gilfy650a · #8 Unread post by **Gilfy650a** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 8:10 pm

Thats what i love about my nighthawk, the fuel gauge, i can tell how much fuel i have left so i dont have to rely on miles... though i still reset my trip odometer after each fill up.

Gadjet · #9 Unread post by **Gadjet** » Sat Jul 02, 2005 2:12 am

Gilfy650a wrote:Thats what i love about my nighthawk, the fuel gauge, i can tell how much fuel i have left so i dont have to rely on miles... though i still reset my trip odometer after each fill up.

My Suzuki GS650 had one of those too. Didn't work worth crap, either before or after I changed the fuel tank and adjusted the tank float so that it made better contact with the resistor coil.

Occasionally when I would fill the tank up, it would bury the needle - below the empty mark, then gradually come up to about half, then bounce around for a while and then drop back down to E again. I learned to rely on my trip meter to guage how much fuel I had left, and made sure that I filled up within my 'theoretical' range.

ronboskz650sr · Sat Jul 02, 2005 5:26 am

Gilfy650a wrote:Thats what i love about my nighthawk, the fuel gauge, i can tell how much fuel i have left so i dont have to rely on miles... though i still reset my trip odometer after each fill up.

Just yesterday, my bike surged in a left hand curve out in the country. I suddenly remembered that my trip odometer was thirty miles off. I forgot to reset it on the last fillup, until after the twisty section I just couldn't wait to get to! I reached down and flipped to reserve. I had to turn around and go back to town. I put 3.2 gallons into my 3.7 gallon tank. I, for one am glad for the extra feed tube they call "reserve." That extra half gallon would have put me in the middle of nowhere if I had been "running on reserve" instead of "fuel."