Turns out these motorbikes use a suction-based carb/petcock combination, where in essence the carburetor sucks the gas from the tank via a hose that connects to the petcock valve (in addition to the fuel line). There are a couple filters inside the petcock, and if they start to get a little munged up, the suction doesn’t work so well and the bike will die while you’re out riding.
Not fun.
I wasn’t quite aware of this issue (but keep it in mind, I’m coming back to it in a sec) though I was aware that it was leaking oil relatively badly. As it turns out, the oil leak is a pretty standard problem on these bikes. Some browsing on the Suzuki Savage forums clued me in and offered the info I needed to try something I hadn’t done since we did a couple classes on small engine repair in 1975 when I was in 7th grade – pull the top off the engine and fix the leak.
The process of doing this was a bit terrifying to me – I hadn’t had the bike -that- long, and I didn’t really have the finances kicking around to replace it if I completely botched the job and killed the engine. But hey – no guts, no glory, and wasn’t this part of why I bought it in the first place?
So I downloaded a template to help keep track of which bolts go where, and had at it.
It actually went pretty smoothly. The black plug in the photos is an odd thing. For reasons unknown to science, when Suzuki designed this engine they gave three of the four cylinder bolts easy access, you just pull the head cover and bang, there they are. But the fourth bolt is actually -underneath- the cylinder head, and if you were going to pull the whole engine apart, you have to remove this plug to get access to the bolt underneath it. Since oil circulates in the head, the plug keeps it from leaking out, all over that bolt and then dripping out onto the engine next to the exhaust header. Bizarre. Anyway, the stock plug is pretty chintzy and fails something like 94% of the time. I bought a more sturdy replacement and dropped it in, easy peasy.
The only problem I ran into was upon putting the head cover back on, one of the longest bolts stripped while tightening – and it wasn’t the bolt that stripped, it was the deep-in-engine threads. I didn’t manage to get any photos of that process, but again a little time on the Savage forum provided the answer – turn the bolt into a stud/nut combo. One of the forum users explained the process, and as it turned out lived just across the river in Kentucky. He grabbed some threaded rod he already had on hand, drove over and we sorted it out. Proof that humans are actually good things, most of the time.
Now all buttoned up and running as expected, things were fine.
But remember that suction/petcock issue I mentioned? Well. It inadvertently bit me pretty hard.