1980 Yamaha XS11 Special

[2LZ]

Figured I'd start a new thread on the project.
As clean as the bike looks cosmetically, as always, I'm finding the ills (and bonuses) caused by others hands in the bike's past.

The bike has a 4-in-1 exhaust but a stock air box, which contained an ancient Uni filter. I've ordered four pod filters for it but will keep the stock air box in the shed.

I've also discovered that the bike has been re-jetted a little richer on the mains. Hopefully this means that someone knew what they were doing when the exhaust was installed.

The weird thing is that this bike came in a couple different fuel feed versions. One containing a vacuum manifold (Octy) and some did not. Either mine had already been removed (common fix), or it never had one. Regardless, the two petcocks are really odd. They have an off, on, and reserve positions, along with a fourth "prime" position.....and of course, there was no arrow on the handle. Does the handle point at the position?... or the opposite side of the handle? Each petcock also had two fuel outlets each, for a total of four.....but the bank of carbs only has two fuel inlets.

I finally got to the bottom of it all by internet research and also, taking them out of the tank and blowing through them, the old fashioned way. Glad I did because someone had swapped both petcocks side to side, then managed to feed the bank of carbs out of the "prime" outlets, and the "on" outlets were bridged side to side with a common hose. Either way, it was all wrong.

The brake fluid looked years old but bled out nice on the rear. I replaced it with some good DOT 4. I still have to do the fronts but won't get to that until the new bars arrive. The ones on it are bent.

So far each carb has been cleaning up nicely and I only found one (badly) stuck float. Got all four rebuild kits in yesterday, so that's going to be finished today.