Noah

try wrapping the carb outlet with some electrical tape or something that will be pliable enough to seal small gaps but be able to make the carb alil bigger so you can tighten the boot, maybe try a bicycle inner tube it would work well

I agree looks like alil is coming from the nuetral switch but also like most is coming from under the sprocket cover which is on the lsft side near the shifter where the drive chain goes behind the cover to the drive sprocket or output sprocket what ever you wanna call it, the oil definatlly looks like it has water in it, did the bike sit outside for awhile? replace the oil and check for leacks under the cover, also it l;eaks more when running cause the oil pressure is higher with the engine running. edit: also from what I've been hearing the haynes manuales have alot of wrong info in them like each chapter was writen by someone differant and none of them talked to eachother or did any research on the bike.

as far as the letter after your "cc" number all that denotes is the year of the bike for yamaha internal use, as you already know the year what letter it is is kind of futile.

just a quik touch back on the exaust wrap, it used to be a big thing with the '60's hotrod and ratrod guys, I believe it came from drag racing, the idea is to hold the heat into the exaust so that the hot gases help pull or vacume themselfs from the cylinders also to help keep the temp down under the hood so that the engine can get more cold air and keep engine temps down, you only wrap the headers nothing else and the wrap tends to make the pipes rust and rot faster, your only going to see a performance differance in a race application not a daily driver and I don't think you really want to wrap the exaust on a bike anyway.

I'd stick with the stock air system, I hear if you go to the pods you have to re-jet the carbs since the engine is getting so much extra air. personally just a hassle I'd rather not deal with besides I rather cruise then scream along and the bike stock has plenty of pull.

this is on all modern internal combustion motors, it is there to allow air pressure inside and outside the engine to equalize, in cars the breather line comes out the valve cover most times and into the intake allowing any gasses formed by hot oil in the engine to be burned off making the engine cleaner yet the hot gases tend to reduce alil power as we all know the colder the air the more power, so on high performance engines mostlly V-8's you see a simple filter ontop of the valve cover to help condense any oil out of the gas and keep it in the engine and let the gas vent yet not ingest the hot gas to harm performance.

there is certainlly more involved in painting then 5 minutes worth of time. there is a nation wide place called http://www.maaco.com/, they are cheap for a reason they like to cut corners and paint over paint and they don't mask well, that being said go rent an air compressor if you don't have one and a special blasting gun that doesn't use glass beads or sand but uses baking soda it works just as good but doesn't take any good metal and is better for the enviroment, once you have the parts blasted mask them off yourself then bring them to maaco and have them spray them, thier price includes paint from a basic list of like 20 colors but they will spray any color you want, in general thier spray jobs tend to last about 5 years then the clear coat starts to peel and flake yet if you do a decent proper job at prepping the parts first and not leave it up to them the job will turn out much better, I don't know what it cost to get bike tins sprayed but since the maaco near me advertises deals on spraying full cars for aslow as $200, shit I'd spend the extra and have them do a decent job

I believe mine are 18" front and 16"rear, my rims are stock for '82 xs400 heritage special

just curious what an '82 xs400sj Heratage Special with around 6,0000 original miles, single owner would be worth once I get it running from sitting for 10 years and polish the chrome, theres nothing else wrong with the bike, paint is mint, my father was the owner so I know the bike was well taken care of and not riden hard or aggesively. My dad bought the bike new from the dealer, he liked the idea that the bike looked alot like a euro cafe racer with the reliability and craftsmanship of the jap bikes, he rode it for 2 seasons then got a v65 1100 Honda Magna.

I know it's way past this point but you could also us a slide hammer and pull the shaft out.

I found your answer, make sure if thats an '82 it's from either the seca or the maxim but not mine the xs400SJ (heritage speacial) my bike was the last of that engine, starting in '82 with the seca's and maxim's all future xs400's had the dohc 399cc not the sohc 392cc Scroll to the bottom of the page for a complete list of the xs400 line and the basic differaces A moderator should take the chart on this link page and sticky or tac it to the boards as it has some very good info thats kinda hard to find.

mines an '82 xs400sj and from your pics it looks the same minus the cracks. (sorry couldn't help it). so I was gonna replace my paper element aswell as clean the screen, are those threads left or right handed? edit: just found that K&N sells an oil filter for the xs400 and the same filter is used on every model xs400 from '78-'84 from what I could find so I'd assume all the covers are the same. maybe the only differance would be number of cooling fins and fin hight other then that the diameter would be the same and the bolt hole should be the same, although the more I look at pics of them from diff. years and the newest one I can find is an '81 they all hold the filter in the cover where yours looks like it flush mounts

wow was the gasket stuck and you pryed it with a flathead screwdriver? hope you didn't damage the center bolt if it's like mine it acts like the center of the filter and you just slip the element over it. have you looked at www.mikesxs.net

nice vid it's not as bad as some I've seen, love that sound reminds me of my first bike, my dad and I restored a '78(I think) YZ80 back in '88 I want to say is when we finished it, I was 8 when she was done and I rode that bike till I was 17 and it still screamed, 4th gear was surprisingly fast, so nice to see a group of ppl so dedicated to restoring some of the great bikes from the time.

it's possible one of the plugs got fouled, try taking a small, soft wire brush and cleaning the plugs up or just go ahead and get new ones since they are cheap insurance.