Wow, it's been ages since I've been around here / posted anything...
The Machismo's fresh engine got pretty well broken-in over the course of last year; Sometime in Autumn I finally had looked into the starter problem and found it was only the solenoid, which costs about $5 here in India.
Later loaned it to a friend whose 500 Classic (C5?) was in for its own rebuild in the midst of some labor/ management upheaval at the local RE showroom... so it ended up being with him a month or two. He gave it back one evening, quite impressed with its power/smoothness, but two issues had come up: 1. wouldn't upshift properly. He'd thought it was a clutch-related issue and the dummies at the showroom had fooled with it a long while, putting a new cable, adjusting / readjusting, etc. To me it didn't feel like anything a clutch would do, so took off the gearbox side cover and finally found that the self-locking nut on the end of the countershaft had come loose, allowing the shaft to move axially... tightened up (with Locktite), and all's well.
Secondly, on my friend's watch it had just started this thing of the engine dying whenever the headlamp was switched on. Ever since I'd bought it it had occasionally blown its fuse (the main one, there's another up under the seat but not sure what if anything it does), and once when I'd run out of spares I "temporarily" direct-wired it... yeah, not a great idea and though it took two months for it to finally happen, I suppose the raging fire in the left sidebox one dark night was predictable.
That was in December and we were away for the remainder of the winter so got back to it yesterday. Damage not too extensive, did a bit of re-wiring, also re-locating the starter solenoid so I could reclaim the left sidebox for its original intended (or other) use.
That done, got thinking of the right sidebox, which the big air-filter has taken over in later models. This Indian AVL has lot of convoluted / leak-prone plumbing between it and the carb besides, and I thought it best to just be rid of all of it.
And while I'm going to that much trouble, may as well swap in the 32mm carb, too.
Reason I hadn't done that already is that:
1. The carb was a salvaged piece from a 220cc Indian bike... figured re-jetting/setup was going to consume a lot of time.
2. It is one of the few electric-choke bikes in India, though the original manual choke plunger is not very ideally located, I really wanted to keep things simple as possible.
3. It already ran pretty well with the 28mm and gave great fuel mileage, so on of those "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" things.
Happily / surprisingly, it started right up without the choke (late winter here), idles fine, and seems to run pretty well across the board, plenty responsive for me - so it seems fine-tuning will not be too painful.
Real-world performance and economy will have to be gauged as time goes on, but I can't imagine but that the former wouldn't be better... the elimination of all that (convoluted) plumbing alone would have to make some positive difference, even without the bigger carb.
Conversion was painless - throttle cable is on opposite side but same length / adjuster fits the new carb. Same fuel line works too. I modded a manifold from a (223cc) Indian Honda. Could've used a UCE500 piece too, but this one provides more space for the bigger carb/filter as it's angled outward slightly. Air filter's paper, possibly a little more flow area than OE, but might try and find a foam one for it. Fitted to carb with a trimmed junkyard piece of radiator hose. Fab'd the stainless steel shield over it - mainly to keep rainwater off the paper element, as this bike gets parked outside most of the time.
If I'd known it was gonna be this easy, I'd have done it long ago.
If I end up needing a functional choke will probably go with the electric setup / handlebar-mounted switch, which in truth would be a little better than groping around behind the fuel petcock all the time. The electric start seems to make the whole process of getting it going a lot more flexible / forgiving.
Anyway, happy to have it running again and running well, and also to have a lot more on-board storage space. Gonna put together a tool/spares kit for one side and keep First-Aid / and maybe a pack of biscuits in the other... :-)
-Eric