Upgrading to standard

With its engine runnning too lean, I have had a bit of work on the R1100S recently to investigate what's wrong and how to cure it. Again, I have to say thanks to Robert from Foster Performance as he lent me a hand to acheive this. I had my doubts about possible causes, but his efforts led to discover actual reasons as to why the air/fuel ratio was so poor.

"Spark plugs remote diagnosis", this is what Robert provided. Along with the fact he knows my bike pretty well - he provided most of the performance parts, he knows how a spark running in normal conditions should look like. Staring at these plugs at each side of the Atlantic ocean, we both came to the same conclusions : the dyno run results were right and the air/fuel ratio is too lean.

Sparks are way too white, meaning the mixture's too lean. They got to be a bit brown.

Now we had to find out why. The Motronic unit first had to be inspected to check if the software wasn't conflicting with the Power FRK module. A racing chip, for instance, could have caused such a problem. None were found and the rest of the unit looks pretty standard, so let's look somewhere else.

Unsealed Motronic unit

 I kept telling Robert about the Nology ignition cables, but he seemed to concentrate on more important parts of the bike first. I guess I twas taking a shortcut and he wanted to make a proper diagnosis. Again, we both came to the same conclusion : theqz Nology cables had to be removed. They are certainly making a huge spark inside the cylinder, but with the standard amount of fuel the mixture is overburning. One of the unwanted side effects is that the engine is also overheating and that makes it prone to break.

Standard ignition cables

Your pipes can get blueish, but when they're turning that blue there may be a heat problem

Since this last decision, the bike hasn't moved much, but standard ignition cables now replace the Nology ones. I'm supposed to do a couple of kilometers with this configuration to see how the sparks' color changes and let's hope it will.