‘The dealership wanted £1000 to fix a £3.30 problem’
Owner was lucky to escape mega bill
Sometimes the cheapest of components can cause seriously big issues – and the repair bills to match!
When a customer called up Jim WrightRoberts, mechanical maestro and owner of Superbike Surgery LTD, he reported that his local dealer was asking for a cool £1000 for the privilege of replacing the throttle body on his troublesome 690 Duke.
Happy for the challenge, Jim got straight to work. An initial test revealed the bike felt lean, struggling to start and being choppy on the throttle.
After digging into the data, Jim uncovered that the bike was almost maxed out in its capacity to deliver fuel, just to keep its mixture around the correct ratio.
Jim said: “It was having to add loads of petrol to keep it rich enough. What the fuel trim numbers were saying was that the ECU was having to hold the injector open far longer than normal. From that, I knew it had a fuel pressure problem.”
Following his well-trained nose, Jim coupled up a pressure tester and lo and behold, the KTM was managing just 2.3 bar. Way below 3.3-3.7 bar it should be.
“I heard a weird noise in the tank, so I ran a borescope in there and realised something was split.”
With pressured fuel spraying out from the in-tank filter, the case was almost solved. After gutting the tank and testing the filter, his suspicions were confirmed – the filter had a hairline crack, allowing pressurised fuel to gush out.
A trip to the auto-parts store later and Jim had a fresh filter ready to go, saying: “KTM wanted £48 for it, but after a bit of googling I found the same exact part for £3.30!”