I read a story of a guy that had a PROBLEM with his cb350 EXACTLY the same as mine minus the cable being super stretched out:
( "Hey guys,
I'm back for more, with what I fear is a far more serious issue this time. But hey, who knows? Not me, that's for sure.
So it's my first bike, it's had a fair deal of issues since I got it, now it's got a new one.
This problem has slowly developed and has gotten progressively worse, I'll explain, starting at the beginning. I've only had it on the road for about a month and a half and in that time I've put about 500-600 miles on it, the last half of that was done in the last three weeks after I got new tires. But when I first got it back on the road I put 100 miles on it in one day, at the very end of that ride I was coming down my block in 3rd gear, and a strange thing happened. The bike seemed to lug and surge, it was intermittently losing power, the revs were remaining the same, but would blip up when the bike lost power to the rear wheel as if I was pulling the clutch in and out briefly, and keeping the throttle on steady.
It didn't happen again for a while, I chalked it up as a fluke that I decided to ignore, but all the while in the back of my head I worried. So it was okay about 90% of the time after that, but every so often seemingly at random this thing would happen where 3rd gear seemed to slip or something.
One day about two weeks ago I was riding and this happened and I tried to shift up into fourth and it wouldn't go, no matter how hard I pulled up on the shift lever. So I slowed down, shifting down to first, and then brought it back up and it was okay. And this has popped up every now and then, and I've shifted down to second, back to third and then it would go, and third was fine most of the time too when I was riding around in third.
Today I take it out and it's markedly worse. I rode home with only 2 gears available to me. It did the lagging thing in third where the rear wheel was losing power, and I couldn't get it into fourth no matter what, no amount of diddling with the shifter and clutch would make it go. Even parked, with the engine off, I could get it into third but not fourth...?? go figure.
Then it started getting even worse, as I explained the feeling of the lagging/surging problem was equivalent to the feeling that the bike was slipping into neutral briefly and back into gear, however the indicator light never came on. But when riding today it started slipping into neutral when I pulled away from stop lights, from 1st or 2nd it was apt to slip into neutral, usually only when slowing or pulling away from a stop, sometimes when I pulled the clutch lever in, while I was in 2nd, but before I downshifted it would slip into neutral of its own accord. 3rd gear was unusable because of the slipping, intermittent power problem, and I couldn't get into fourth, at times I couldn't even get into 3rd.
So here's my novice suspicions, the bike is forty years old, 18,000 miles on it. The bars are not stock, they're taller than they should be, so the clutch cable is very tight, i've replaced the stock throttle cable after it broke, so part of me thinks the clutch cable is screwed due to the tightness, the lever is pretty hard to pull it's so tight, a mechanic told me I must have forearms like popeye to ride it like that, but he said as long as it worked to deal with it. Anyway like I said 40 years old, probably the original clutch for all I know, I've read a book about motorcycle maintenance and another reason I'm thinking of is that the clutch is simply shot, the fiber plates are worn to nothing and it's slipping and causing problems. I'm also concerned about the shift lever possibly being bent, or misaligned, I've got no other reason to think that, just a possible problem I thought up, mostly because of the inability to get up into fourth.
As if that wasn't enough, yesterday somebody hit my bike with a car and knocked it on its side. It fell on it's right side, the non-shift lever side, and is cosmetically okay, no dents, no dings, just some spilled gas. It was on it's side for a few hours at least before I found it. And it ran fine most of today until the end when it had big problems. Now I've read about the possibility of getting gas in your crank case, in your oil, I don't know if that could contribute to the issues I'm having but I thought I'd point it out.
In any case, the bike is going off the road, I'm heading to Alaska, where I work summers on May 4th, so this problem won't be resolved anytime soon. Probably next December, it's going to my mom's garage in South Carolina, looks like a Christmas break problem. But I'd like to tinker with it a bit before I go.
What do you guys think? Replace the clutch plates? Replace the clutch cable? Both? Oil change while I'm at it. What else should I look for? And my big concern, is this problem deeper than the clutch, i.e. is it possible the actual gears are messed up in the transmission, missing teeth etc.? Please tell me what to check for.
Thanks in advance,
Matt" )
-From http://www.motorcycleforum.com/showthread.php?t=91271
