How to make you air box fit tight

[alorio1]

How to make your air box fit tight

I had trouble with my air box ocassionally popping off one carb or the other making the bike run bad before I discovered it had popped of one of my carbs. I could actually pull the air box off with my hands after all four clamps were tightened. Upon futher inspection I noticed all four clamps would bottom out before the air box had a good tight seal on the carbs. I wanted to keep the original clamps on my bike so here is what I did:
I removed the screw and straightened the band clamp out a bit. Then I used a 6" needle nose pair of vice grips to make two bends in the clamp, thus giving the clamp a smaller circumfrence , which allowed me to be able to tighten clamp much tigther on the carb bodies without band bottoming out and no threads left on screw. Bike seems more responsive when whacking on throttle from idle now, and air box stays on carbs even if it happens to pop during carb syncing.

 

[SpecOps13]

Man, if that isn't innovative thinking I don't know what is, Very Cool Fix....:clapping:

 

[one2dmax]

New airbox boots would have fixed it. The problem with the fix is the uneven clamping that is going to be in the area of the new bend. If you could have bend it more similar to the factory step you would have kept the transition smooth.

Sean

 

[alorio1]

Maybe someone can improve on this, they usually can, new OEM boots was about 53 bucks without shipping and this little fix works for me and cost .00 cents. I connected the box to an old carb and tightened the clamp to see if there was a gap between the boot and carb body and saw none, so I can only think the boot rubber is thick enough to forgive the bend transition in the clamp. It even passed a light test to see if there was a problem at the transition point. Some may use the bending of the clamp method some may not, people with the problem I had may order new boots and we will see boot sales go up or radiator water hose clamps will work fine, not OEM , but what the heck, a fix is a fix..........

 

[Bill Seward]

The boots were so badly dried out and shrunk on my '85 that I used a glove under the top cover to put a bit of pressure on the airbox to hold it on.

Then I bought new boots and fixed the problem. Great idea to modify the clamps, though. However, my boots were shrunk so bad they actually were too short to have the clamp get a hold on them to tighten. I tried the radiator hose fix, still wouldn't work. New boots were expensive, but in my case, the only option...