I know several of you have previously or currently own a Valkyrie, so I have a question about a carb problem with my '97 Valk. A friend of mine has been riding this bike the last 2 years, in hopes he could buy it. However, due to finanaces and health issues that did not happen so, I now have the bike back in my possession. The bike will only start in full choke position, and you have leave the choke partially closed to get the revs up to get it rolling. However, once you are going 10-20 mph, you can open the choke all the way, and it then runs like normal, and cruises through all gears and at all speeds without hesitation or any kind of carb problem. At first I thought it was a carb sync problem, so I pulled the intakes off and checked the butterfly position of each carb just to make sure one of the butterfly valves was covering one-half of the first of those four tiny holes. (Read that on the internet)

About two years ago a service station attendent accidently put diesel in the tank, so my buddy says. He had a back-yard mechanic friend clean it out somehow and got it running. Not sure if he remove the carbs and clean them or what. He says, it has been running fine since then. But, I don't think he really rode it that much, just couple times a month. I have owned a couple other Valks before and on one bike had the carbs cleaned and rebuilt and it was super responsive and fast, but very expensive at about $700. I might also try to run a couple cans of Seafoam through it to see if that helps.

It is hard to find a good Honda shop around here that has a mechanic that knows how to work on a old carburated Valk, so I am hoping someone on here can lead me in the right direction. There is a guy from Arkansas that has a number of good videos on Youtube and I might try cleaning the carbs myself.