Last Saturday morning I woke to the gift of a flashing Fi light on my bike, along with a refusal to drop off from cold start. I had never struck this before but after confirming it was a fault with the Secondary Throttle Valve Actuator (STVA) via the 'paperclip in the dealer inspection plug' trick I knew where to look. And sure enough, upon inspection the secondary butterflies only had around 5 degrees of movement, instead of their normal 40'ish. So despite not having pulled an STVA off before I dived on in. Removing it returned the full range of movement, but putting it back on took that all away again. I dismantled the STVA to inspect it (using YT vid's and my service manual) but all looked normal in there, the action was smooth and as it should be.
I checked its operation off of the bike, and sure enough it did as it was supposed to. But only when the STVA's sensor was removed. Put the sensor back on, and back to 5 degrees of movement from the actuator. I was beginning to wonder if I had an ECU issue, but as there was something still physically restricting the butterflies movement I hoped addressing that would solve the sensor issue. I have another GSXR1000 so I grabbed the STVA off that bike hoping it would resolve the issue (I checked its operation before removing it), alas the same problem was still there. But at least that confirmed it was me doing something wrong now.
I searched and searched online looking for a fix, I had now worked out it was the sensor itself restricting the movement. But as the sensor was still in its factory position and nothing else on the bike had changed, it just didn't make sense. The service manual shed no light on the issue either, I was beginning to lose hope and was now considering getting the bike to a shop. But it's not a complicated system, there was nothing obvious that was fitted incorrectly by me, so it was now a challenge I didn't want to give up on.
Then I found it. Well at least I hoped. A random video in the depths of YT gave me 5 seconds of info that I had not found anywhere else. According to the video there is a hidden internal spring in the sensor that needs to be wound around before fitting the sensor back on. This was very late last night, it was cold in the garage, so I decided to revisit it this morning. And what do you know, he was right. I had not seen this mentioned in any other video I had watched, nor in the service manual. I now have everything put back in place, fastened, inspected and working 100%. Watching the butterflies do their dance upon start up was a glorious thing to behold.
90% of the battle with my injury is the pain. The other 10% is only having one arm to use. But that 10% can have quite an effect, in fact the complete loss of use of an upper limb is considered to be 65% bodily impairment. And a lot of things are quite challenging. Interestingly, the big jobs are the ones that challenge me less in a way as for someone with two arms it would still be a hard work. It's the little jobs that are sometimes the most frustrating. Zip ties. Electrical connector blocks. All jobs that take 20 seconds with both arms. With one, it can turn into a 20 minute exercise of cursing, deep breaths and patience. For little reward. Or in my case on Sunday night, walking away from the bike after spending an hour trying to disconnect one electrical connection.
So there was huge satisfaction in completing this job. For one I fixed the issue. I also learnt how the STVA system works from scratch. I learnt how to fix it and install it correctly. And I did it almost literally with one hand tied behind my back (well in my pocket).
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