X1 let me down for the very first time, on the way to the AGM!

Gizmo

Club Member
So its the day of the AGM and I thought it was time to get the Buell out of hybernation. The now 17 year old battery had been on charge over night and it had a near full tank of fuel left over from last October. Sorry to keep mentioning the battery but its endless reliability is starting to freak me out!

It cranked over and fired up on the 3rd attempt (there is no cold start on this bike) and after a bit of coughing and spluttering it started to run smooth.

So off I set on a bright sunny morning to the AGM.

Then after about a quarter of a mile I could smell fuel and when I looked down there was a rooster tail of fuel spurting out from under the tank on the left hand side. Bad times. It was hard to see what the matter was and I had not tools on me (for a for the first time ever) so all I could do was to push the bike all the way back to the work unit. A long walk of shame. With no time to diagnose the problem I jumped in the car and came over to the AGM on 4 wheels.

On Monday I started to investigate the problem and it turned out to be a failure of the joint where the pressure side of the fuel system joins the fuel filter. This is seeing full injection pressure. Having removed the tank a couple of years ago to take the heads off and I used a jubilee clip on the hose to the fuel filter. This had caused a pinching of the rubber bore even though it was the correct size and over time this had lead to a failure of the joint.

So this is the first time in 17 years the bike has failed to get me to my destination. Not bad going I suppose considering when I bought the bike in 2000 I was ridiculed by my fellow bikers because of the makes reputation for unreliability.

I trimmed the end of the hose off where the jubilee clip permanently deformed the rubber into a slight pear shape. Apart from the area of the clip the rubber hoses were in remarkable condition considering their age but I found a new old stock OEM filter kit on ebay in the US that comes complete with new hoses and proper crimp type hose clips. As I have never changed the filter and X1 parts are getting harder to find I had to order it. I wont be using jubilee clips for injection fuel hose in the future.


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