That dark spot on the desert floor is from the gas drained when Sam pulled the plug on the hose.
By:furndog
Canister-ectomy lite or how to make a short story long. After a near fatal bout of canisteritis I successfully preformed the operation on Willie. Sambo, my riding buddy came over to admire the entrails and came up with an amazing theory.
I had a mess of hoses, valves, fittings and cans laying in a pile on the shop floor. Sam walked around this jumbled mess several times, picked up a valve and blew through it then sucked on one of the hoses and then threw everything back down on the floor and exclaimed.
“What the f@#* is this thing?”
“What thing” I asked.
“This plug or whatever it is thing”
That plug is a beautiful piece machined from billet aluminum with a knurled edge, a quality KTM part to be sure.
“I don’t know” was my reply.
“I think it’s a drain, a drain for the canister when it fills up with gasoline.”
It wouldn’t be long before we could test his theory. The next week we were in the Nevada desert and 100 yards into the first trail section Sam’s bike takes a little nap. Ride report here. Long periods of engine cranking, hard starting and belching smoke confirmed he too was suffering from a mild case of cannisteritis. No mas, no mas, Sam has had it. “What side is that plug on?” he asks. Those engineers think of everything, hence the knurled edge, as you need your gloves on to fish out the plug from behind the hot exhaust header, pull the plug off the hose and drain the fuel and you are good to go.
Now this is just Sam’s theory but it worked for him at the time. His bike was extremely hard starting and after draining the fuel from the system his bike would start on half a crank, like nothing was ever wrong.
If you are still running with a canister give this a try if the need arises.
That dark spot on the desert floor is from the gas drained when Sam pulled the plug on the hose.