One of my newly acquired xt's had a completely rust covered tank, but the outside is in great shape so I just did the drywall screws. They work, took about 1/2hr worth of shaking, tumbling,rocking , over and over. My arms hurt this morning but I have relatively good tank now. I need to rinse with some POR15 to hopefully get rid of the little spots. I won't do the sealing , I have seen a tank done and it looked horrible.
Yes, any abnormal activity tends to hurt, lots of red neck ways to spin your tank about on youtube including tying it to a wheel, guess your way is the safest, I didn't do anything in the end, fuel seems to be OK now, at the mo anyway.
Yours wasn't rusted before so it should be good, takes a few years to get significant rust. Did you ever add gas with a gas jug? Over here we get lots of crud from them if not flushed out regularly. I think it comes from the gas station nozzles.
I did get fuel via a gas can (plastic), I guess it could get overlooked that crud could build up inside, the carbs in pieces at the mo and when I get round to fitting (waiting for orings) I'll stick fresh fuel in.
And looking at the manifold head orings looks like one of them is broken, something else I guess to make it run rough, runs great on acceleration, just rough when holding a speed. Hunting and splurting.
I have a couple good O-rings here if you want to drop by and pick them up, there yours
When you let up on the gas did the rpms drop off quickly or did it hesitate and not want to slow very fast? That's one sign of air leaking in the manifolds. The hunting and surging that one of mine does at steady throttle is due to it running rich, still don't know why it is.
Those intake boots, would any other models work , like these XJ's, I can get decent used ones for cheaper yet if I watch for them or these new ones are cheaper than new XT's. Since I could use 2 or 3 sets http://www.ebay.com/itm/YAMAHA-XJ550-XJ ... d8&vxp=mtr
It would depend on what carb they used wouldn't it and how that carb actually flows? Vacume carbs flow less than flat slides so need a bigger hole, and other such technical jumbo that dictates size needed. I looked at a set of three carbs off a 600SRX snowmobile, those carbs where 30mm approx. The XT carbs were still on the bike so I couldn't place nose to nose but a quick comparison showed the sizes equal enough that the 2 of us couldn't see any difference. Those are another one of the boots I was eyeing, on top of the carbs themselves. Actually those are 30mm TM's I believe. That is spread out to three cylinders. The XT's are 28mm I believe but the nose seems thicker than my Mikuni's.