I’ve got the “stuck at the dealer blues!”
Start & Stop: Vina del Mar, Chile – No riding day #3!
Mileage: 1 dad-gum mile
Hotel: Hotel Vancouver, 2 Poniente, Vina del Mar, Chile
Fuel: $716 Chilean Peso /l liter ($1.51/1 liter) or $5.72 per gal!
Currency Exchange: $1 USD = $473 Chilean Peso
Chilean Toll Road: $400-1500 Chilean Pesos ($0.85-$3.17 USD)
Dean: Not sure why but the James Bond theme is running thorugh my head as I sit here on my Jesse Saddlebag. Today’s Valentine’s Day and it’s my wife Sue’s birthday, hence the title “From Chile with Love!”
Lisa is 30′ away sitting in a stairwell of a car pit working on her laptop. She’s got major problems of her own! We’ve been hanging around this Suzuki Auto/Motociclite dealership since 8:30 AM.
Lisa: Indeed. someone lifted my credit card number and charged over $3000 at a furniture store in Bogota. So I call the company and get a delightful woman in India. Sweet. Apparently my options are 1) cancel the card now or 2) keep using the card and have to dispute the charges when i get home. I don’t like either of those, especially since I can’t get a straight answer as to when or how I can get a replacement card. I am going to boycott companies who offshore their “customer service”. I’m so done with that.
Dean: When we arrived, we learned the top motocicleta mechanic would not be in today!!! After waiting for him all weekend, this was not good news. An auto mechanic was redirected to assist us. This is going to be interesting. The mechanic “Jose” speaks no English. We basically speak no Spanish when it comes to M/C operation, components, etc. Matias Archambaud is across the street in the sales department and comes over every hour to check up on progress and assist with the diagnosis. Mathias has a DL650. The service mgr owned a DL650 in the past also speaks basic english. So we move forward eliminating things slowly.
Lisa: Dean and I both got basic service:
Jose thought this would was the loss of power problem. No way! I've had air filters way dirtier than this. Anyway, a new air filter did not fix the 4100 RPM choking.
This is what I thought would fix the problem. Fuel pump removed from gas tank, disassembled, and filter cleaned.
This is slightly out of focus. But no major blockage of gunk/debris on the filter! Just some metal shavings. Whoa, that's not good but nothing entered the pump.
Matias and Jose evaluating data from Suzuki Diagnosis System.
Tomorrow we continue to search for the 4100 RPM loss of power problem.
Oil filter and oil change. Chain maintenance, cleaned, adjusted. Mathias and the mechanic checked my chain and said it was in good condition but had not been properly adjusted. The torque on the 650 is a lot different than the 1000 and you adjust it based on the play on the top of the chain rather than the bottom. I have a new chain with me but they felt this one was in good condition.
Dean:
The following has been done to my bike:
1. The Power Commander was taken off-line yesterday. The stock connectors reattached to themselves. The bike still goes into choke-like mode at 4100 rpm.
2. Air filter was pretty loaded. But not enough to cause the problem. New air filter and bike still chokes at 4100 RPM.
3. Fuel pump was removed from gas tank and dismantled to inspect the fuel filter. There was minor debris stuck on the base of the filter. Again not enough to restrict the flow of gas.
4. Fuel pump was tested for output. It was a steady 3 bars (3 psi?). They said right where it was supose to be. Again test ride proved no fix.
5. The Suzuki Diagnosis System (PC plugged into the V-Stromboni’s dealer plug) indicates a few minor problems but nothing to explain why the high speed butterflies won’t open.
There is a new DL1000 in the show room. I asked Matias about dropping the EECU into my DL1000. He said no. We’ll talk more about this option or getting a new EECU from Santiago. Tomorrow we start checking the sensors/actuators around the throttle body.
Meanwhile, Lisa found us a place to stay tonight – The Hotel Vancouver. Half the hotel at twice the price!
Wow, sorry to hear about the “issues” that y’all are having to deal with right now. Hoping you can get back on the road and enjoying the riding part of the trip again today.
You mentioned that the butterflies won’t open all the way. Has that been confirmed? Could be a TPS (throttle position sensor) problem, but I don’t think that is very likely.
Hard to diagnois things long distance and I know you have Strom experts like BR working all the angles, but when you disconnected the Power Commander, did you also disconnect the battery to remove power from the ECU and let it reset? I think I would at least try that in case the PC caused a change in the standard ECU settings. Sometimes pulling the power to let the ECU it reset itself will help. It’s a longshot, but it does not cost anything to try. Obviously, if they disconnected the battery to work on the bike and it still would not rev up when you tested it, this is not the issue.
I just have to add a comment about their explanation of needing to adjust a 650 chain from the slack in the top run instead of the bottom run. Really? That is just total BS. If you put the bike in gear and pull one run of the chain tight, the other run will have the same amount of slack as it will if you did it the other way. Doh!
The upside is that if the 4100 RPM issue can’t be corrected in the time remaining, LL could opt to slow down on the GirlieStrom and allow JC/NB to keep up at 60mph on the ManlyStrom. Y’all can still get to the destination, just not quite as fast.
:)
Here’s hoping that y’all get everything fixed and are back to the adventure ASAP!
for lisa. call the credit card company and tell whoever in india answers that you want to speak to an american. i’m told this works. good luck. i just had my card numbers lifted. it’s a royal pain in the ass. gary
I hope you get it fixed, but:
Since every day counts when you’re down there and since you can do 70 mph no problem, you may end up riding it the way it is and hope it doesn’t get worse. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. I rode from Mendoza to Ushuaia with a badly-slipping clutch and it was ok – - just added another element to the adventure. It seems there is always SOMETHING wrong with the bikes. Good luck. By the way Dean, there is nothing wrong with a little sightseeing and relaxing!
Hi Dean,
I don’t know electronic motorcycles, but I can tell you that 3 bar is about 45 psi.
Upward wishes,
John Heiney
Dean, I imagine you’ve already replaced the spark plugs, but I’ve had similar problems but at lower RPM’s.
The TPS sounds like it could be the problem. The 4100 RPM’s, is that on a flat surface? Is it the same going uphill, downhill? I read that you are able to rev it to 5K at a stop without experiencing the issue, but at a stop could the same throttle position actually be at 7 or 8 grand when there is no load on the engine?
This is a wild guess (but it happened to me once so I’ll mention it) but is there some external object that could be blocking the air intake when the bike gets up to speed? In my case, it was the owner’s manual on a brand new ’66 Suzuki X-6 Hustler (because the air intake was behind the side cover).
What JH said. TPS could be it if high speed butterflies are not kicking in. Lisa; BS on the chain tightening, but if it works for you who cares what I think!
Wow – Credit Card issues, whew, this is just not supposed to be part of adventure touring….. Kinda goes beyond the “fun of new experiences” in my book. I do have to say, I’ve had these problems before but with my BofA card they were really great and on top of it before any real damage was done. THen again, 100 miles from home is not 10,000 miles.
By the way Dean – that is the prefilter (in your picture), not the filter. Does not really matter if you did the psi test on it – that proves it is doing what it needs to do.
Having nothing useful to say —– I’ll just go with
Hope it works out — the Credit card as well as the bikes (which may end up being part and parcel.
sending some karma your direction.