how easy to remove carbs?

+1 on what dwalby said. The meter accuracy could be much in question... if it's a cheap meter you are reading with, it could be as much as 10% off also. If it's firing the cylinders, then I would leave it alone.
 
Rob, don't ever listen to Uncle Phil, he's full of IT! (Not really, but...) I never remove the tank to pull the carbs. And, I never loosen the clamp screws to pull the carbs either. A short lever under the edge of the carb caps on both sides will pull them loose of the boots. Ya gotta loosen the clamps and do a couple other things to reinstall, but not to remove'em. Trust me, I did it a half dozen times just last week. :D

Spark, air, fuel. You've got spark or it wouldn't go at all. Air? Good question, how's the filter? Could be a rat's nest in there. Really, I've seen it. Fuel? Most likely the problem. For the best carb analysis, go to ST-Riders.net and access the carb rebuild thread. It is very thorough, yet doesn't require a complete disassembly. This thread is in the public area so you should be able to see it, but I recommend subscribing. Don runs a great site, and it's the hiSToric successor to the original ST e-mail site.
http://www.st-riders.net/index.php?topic=10249.msg89666#msg89666

I'm suffering a similar but not so severe issue with my old 91, recent run yielded only 35 MPG after a complete carb swap with known good carbs. There's another issue on mine I have yet to analyze, but it ain't carbs.

Good luck and keep us poSTed,
 
The fact that you have all 4 plugs (equally?) black might indicate you have some kind of airflow blockage making it run rich, and not at all at higher speeds. I'm guessing if you have a coil issue you'd see that on only one set of cylinders (since there's two separate coils) unless they somehow both went bad the same way/same time (probably not likely). Also, if something is wrong in the carbs its not likely all 4 cylinders would all go equally rich, unless you have a choke issue. You said you checked the choke rail and it looked OK mechanically, but I'm not sure if that's enough to rule that out. Maybe someone else here has experience with choke failures and can give you more advice. The fact that all 4 cylinders are affected makes me think you have a more global issue and not a single point failure somewhere.
 
Gentlemen

Thanks for all the input, after taken the carbs of cleaning them etc etc with all the other bits earlier reported, I changed the coils, it appears I had some bad luck in that both coils had broken down. so that problem is now sorted the bike is reassembled and now clocking up a healthy 1000 miles weekly. I am still running with tcs and ABS lights and the rear brake issue that I cant resolve but they are on a different thread. thanks again guys, just to summarise it was a break down in both ignition coils that was making the engine appear to run very very rich and not letting it pull past 70 and accelerating very poorly. just in case anyone else gets these symptoms.

On to the brakes again this week end

Thanks
 
glad to hear you solved that mystery.

Just curious, have you owned the bike for a while and it just started running badly, or was it in this condition when you acquired it? The reason I ask is the odds of both coils failing at the same time seems like really bad luck on your part if it was running normally before. But if you acquired it like that, then who knows how long the coils had been bad and the PO never bothered to dig into it to fix it.
 
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