Oh no, broken throttle cable

Ed here:

My intention this weekend was to put an auxiliary power outlet in the right saddle bag so we can charge the computer, cell phones, etc.  However, on Wednesday as I was leaving to go to work, the pull throttle cable snapped at the handlebar.  Thank goodness I had not left the garage when this happened.  This would have been a tremendous pain had it happened in route to the office or worse in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness.

On the KLR, I could have changed the cables in about 30 minutes, by the way the KLR sold last weekend, but the Wing is a much more complex machine.  I ordered the cables (I'll replace both push and pull cables) and started to do some research.  I was not able to find much about this procedure in the service manual or on line.  All I knew was that this was going to be a very involved process.  I did stumble across one website that was quite helpful, here is the link.  This is Jim's web page.  I wound up emailing Jim back and forth several times.  He is a great fellow who was very willing to help, I was lucky to find him.  I also reached out to a friend of mine that I found a few years ago on one of the GoldWing message boards named Dave.  Dave has helped me in the past and is a wonderful guy.  I am very thankful for both Jim and Dave's help and support with this project.  I suspect the project would be ten times more difficult without their help.

Yesterday, I started to tear the Wing down to get to the cables.  The cables should be here on Wednesday of this week, so I will complete this project next weekend.  This is turning out to be a very involved process, I have a little over three hours into the job thus far.  It is not hard, just time consuming.  Here is a summary of what I have done thus far.

This poor quality picture is showing the broken cable in the twist grip.  You can see the frayed ends on the right.  The cable separated right at the ball end where it hooks to the twist throttle.

 I removed the seat, top shelter, radio, both fairing pockets, and side covers.  This exposes the air filter box, which will need to be removed.  I wound up removing all of the plastic body pieces on both the right and left sides.  This allows for access to the air filter box.

Here is the left side of the bike with all the body plastic removed.

Here is what the air box looks like with the air cleaner removed.  The carburetors are right under this box.  To remove the box, there are three screw around each of the tops of the carburetors (a total of six screws).  I put paper towels in the tops of the carburetors to keep anything from falling in and loosened the screws.  There are also two screws near the left side closest to the seat which I loosened.

At the base of the air box on the right and left sides, there are two bolts which have to be removed.  This picture shows my socket wrench on the right side bolt.

There are two vacuum lines on the left side of the air box that need to be removed.  One has a green stripe on it and the other has a pink stripe.  The green on is on the left rear and the pink one is on the left front.  At this point you can slightly lift the air box up.  There is one last line, it is a large line on the front right on the underside of the air box. There is a photo a little further below which shows this line.

Here is our first glimpse of the cables with the air box removed.  You will also note there is a small plastic piece in the photo above, it is the piece that unscrewed from the bottom of the air box on the left side closest to the seat.  It is piece number 5 shown on this link.  There are two lines on the bottom of it that have to be removed sot this piece can be taken out in order to get to the cables.

The line from the bottom right of the air box mentioned above can be seen in this photo.  It is in the upper right of the photo.  This hose is going to be a real bugger when it is time to put this all back together.  By the way the two wires sitting above the carburetor in this photo are wires that go to a 12 volt power outlet built into my top shelter.  This is where I charge my ipod or cell phone on long road trips.  The red wires are for LED lights.

 Well, here is the Wing all torn down.  Next weekend, I will install the new cables and get her back together.  I sure hope I can remember where everything goes.