Virago mods: seat has arrived

I purchased a seat off eBay this week. It's new, from a Triumph Scrambler. I placed it on the bike today to get a picture of how it will look.

Here is the bike as it came to me:



Here it is with the seat in place. It's quite a different bike! You can see I will need to build some supportive frame under the seat and do something about side-covers to hide the consequent mess. I will also need to raise the rear of the fuel tank to make it horizontal.









Last Thursday my friend Marlon came by and we pulled the float bowls off the carbs, sprayed carb cleaner around, and boiled the jets. The pilot jet was completely clogged with rubbish. You can see some of the muck that was sitting in the bowls:



We didn't touch the needle jets so that is next on the list, along with replacing the diaphragms. The tappets also need doing, and the carbs want balancing. But the bike's behaviour improved by at least a third - it accelerates much more smoothly, and feels better when cruising. Hopefully by taking care of these other matters the bike will run very well.

I am still deciding whether to replace the dual fuel-tank and its electronic pump with a bigger gravity fed tank as per most older bikes.   I will be sorely tempted to chuck the carbs and purchase a single VM34 Carb, and have somebody make a manifold for it to bolt into the new carb boots.  That is a standard design on, for instance, Harleys and Virago 250s. People who've done this report that the bike becomes more torquey, which sound good to me even if though it becomes less revvy up top.