Ok everyone listen to this one. My superhawk is an 02. It has always run strong, and run daily, and stored in a garage. All of the sudden one night while going at 60-70 mph cruising down the road and I loose power. My first thought was water in my gas, but it's not....It happens 3 out of 10 times when I'm giving it all she's got in the upper rpms, and then she starts to feel like it's only running on one cylinder. I then have to get off the throttle and let the rpms come down to four thousand and then I get a back-fire (not through the air-box, but a normal back-fire out the tailpipe) then the bike runs just as normal as ever untill it happens again. Every single time it happens I let it spin down to 4000 and then the backfire. I'm assuming that one of my cylinders decides to quit hitting and on the spin down the exhaust is igniting that fuel that wasn't burned in the cylinder......So anybody got any superhawk tricks for this one.

 

You're problem is that under high load, high rpm running there is not enough gas getting to the carbs. I suspect something wrong with your petcock or a clogged fuel strainer (in the tank, under the petcock). A third possiblity is a cracked or loose vacuum hose to the petcock so that the petcock is not open as fully as it should be. I guess there's a 4th possibility as well, and that is if the petcock manual shutoff is only partly open. The backfire is from a lean condition just as the dropped cylinder is recovering.

 

Thanks for the reply. All that makes alot of sense. I've never had one of these auto petcocks before. I see much like most "auto" things are more trouble than they're worth. Am I going to need any new gaskets or anthing like that before I start digging into this?