New Member. Long term lurker.

Hi, everybody.
I've been dating my '08 WRR for almost 2 years now and I love her. She's been great. But this year (with this forums help) I decided to give her a makeover.

I took her apart the first weekend of the new year and installed the Atena 290 big bore kit. I used the Atena controller to test the install and everything worked great with that controller, but I could tell some more tuning was possible at the upper rpms.
I had all of the internals polished and improved the airflow where I could.
I added a Bazazz efi auto efi controller. (I welded in an O2 sensor for the controller to use.) So far: I am tempted to put the controller that came with the Atena kit back on. I'm making significantly more power above 3,000rpm with the Bazazz, but below 3,000 it does not always run smoothly and it has a tenancy to die from a dead start when cold or after coming to a complete stop after downshifting. Any advice would be appreciated. The Bazazz controller considers everything below 3,000rpm an idle and it does not alter the stock controller below that. I have thought about maybe trying to find a way to wire the Bazazz controller and the Atena box in tandem, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to even know if that is possible.

Other goodies put on since the first of the year:
Safari tanks 3.7 gal tank
Safari Tanks fairing. (love this thing so far.) It got me a few more mph on the freeway, and the bike just seems to get to top speed so much quicker with the fairing. Also, it cuts down on the feeling of being cold when I tuck down behind it.
And I replaced all of the badly worn plastics that have been dipped in blue and white many times and had decals put on and torn off over the years. I am finally starting over from scratch.

Next up to unbox and install:
rear rack and rotopax tank
side racks
heated handgrips
and off-road lighting. (the light no longer turns with the front wheel now that it's mounted to the fairing, and I am going to miss that feature when it gets dark in the woods or the mountains.)

I just wanted to thank everybody for posting great photos of your mods/repairs, and answering all of the questions I had during the process of putting mine back together. Glad other people asked them first and I didn't need to sit around with my thumb up my butt waiting for help or spontaneous enlightenment. Instead I just did nifty little google searches and inevitably ended up on this forum reading about how you guys worked through my same problems.
Things would have been much more difficult for me without this forum.

I'll post some pictures, but I mostly just wanted to thank the internet. And you peeps.

Before her makeover

Playing in the mud

Naked bones


After the white ranger makeover:

This is before I switched out the old beat up blue handguards for the new white Cycra hand-guards that I put on last night.



I'll post more pictures once she is dirty again. Her name when she was blue was : Diva Plavalaguna, but now that she is super white, I think she might need a name change. Any help with names is appreciated too. :)

Cool looking bike

I would bump the CO adjustment up until it idles and starts as good as possible and bump the idle speed up to 1800-1900 rpms, this maybe all you need to do to tune it.
I had to bump mine up slightly with my fmf programmer, open airbox, fmf pipe but stock CCs, the fmf programmer does nothing at idle.

The CO, TPS and idle speed need to be tweaked to adjust the mixture at idle.

Thanks, Biglake!
This is going to sound dumb probably, but I never knew about our bikes diagnostic mode. I didn't know you could tune through the speedo like that. I had to do some google searches, but I think I understand it now. I'm positive that's what the problem is. I was only ever tuning through the Bazazz.

As far as CO goes: The higher the number the more air it's letting in or is it the opposite?

I'm going to play with it tonight. Can I adjust the tps sensor through the diagnostics mode as well?
I'll try when I get home tonight.

Thanks again!

The higher the CO setting the richer the mixture at idle, this is likely all you need to adjust.

You can check the tps setting in diagnostic mode but you adjust it by moving it, theres threads with instructions on how to adjust it on here if you search tps adjustment.

Ok. That fixed it!
It's like a new bike. Even more of an improvement than when I first put the 290 big bore kit on.
The front wheel doesn't like the ground anymore. It wants to fly. Woohooo!

I've been monkeying around town with CO settings today. When I first went into adjust it the setting was -8. Not sure if that's where the person I bought the bike from set it, or if that's factory setting. I turned it down to -14 and it died at idle. Made sense. Bigger displacement probably needs more gas than it did with 250cc. Bumped it up to 30 just to see what would happen with a big change like that and the bike's Rpms dropped a bit, but it ran good. A little sluggish, but better than before I started.

Finally settled on -3 for now. Might bump it a little more one way or the other after riding it a bit longer. But everything feels good there.
Even though everything was working fine; I bumped my idle setting up to where it's idling around 1750. It's was at 1550/1600 after adjusting CO, which I know is in spec. I followed your advice though and went a little higher with it. Probably not great for overall gas mileage, but I figured it would be nice out on the trail in certain situations.

Good to hear.

My bikes CO was 0 stock, I have it on 6 now. -8 seams really low, even -3 is low but every bike is a little different, if it runs best on -3 run it on -3.

The higher idle and dialed in CO make slow speed trail riding much easier as the bike is pretty hard to stall.