Hey guys,

Pretty new to this all but thought it'd be best to start a dialogue while I still remember everything.

Bought a 1989 ZXR250A (35,000km) and rode it all the way back home. Mostly ran pretty well from what I would have expected, was getting about 6-6.5 litres per 100km which seemed high but believable. Also from about 16k RPM it felt like it had much less power and it was waivering slightly.

Anyway got it back home and for a weekend job decided to pull the carbs to bits to clean them and put them back together. They're in surprisingly good shape, the floats seem to bounce back good, they werent that dirty and the needles looked pretty good. Also replaced the two little hoses that run into the carbs (think they are vacuum hoses?) as they had huge splits and looked like they had fuel leaking from them (would this have been causing the loss of top end power?)

Took the air fuel mixture screws out getting confused with what they were and put them back in at 2.5 turns out. One question I had on this bit is how tight do you make the screw before unscrewing it as it seemed like they could go a little bit further with force although I didn't want to test fate.

Anyway, put it back together and got it going again, seemed to be gurgling and have no power from 4-8km RPM but after 10K RPM it took off, felt like it had almost twice as much power as before. What are peoples thoughts on this? Is it flooding the engine and only keeping up under full throttle? Did the new hose fix the issue and I created one at lower RPM? I definitely still have a lot to learn in this department.

I have also yet to do a lot of the basic servicing such as check spark plugs, check the state of the fuel filter etc, check that the electrics are working as expected. Which would have been the logical thing to start with, hopefully get into that this weekend.


Cheers in advance,