Ran out of Petrol - where was reserve?!!!

[Stilgoe]

Being new to the Honda Dominator having owned it for 1 week now I thought that I would fill up the petrol on wednesday , reset the counter and see what I could get out of it until I hit reserve. Well I certainly did that at a set of lights today in Tottenhamcourt Road. I started to make that running out of petrol sound , so I turned the petrol tap from "ON" to "RESERVE" expecting it to pickup again. It didn't . I was out of petrol . I had done 148 miles to be exact. Is the reserve tap on these the same as other bikes or have I missed something , or more than likely is the reserve part of it missing ? Is 148 miles normal to a tank - seems alright to me - considering its all urban , trafficy , start , stoppyness, but then again i'm used to 80 - 100 miles to a tank on the KTM! which has a smaller tank anyway - still takes a 10 though. Trying to find a petrol station in central London that is open on a bank holiday ! Dominators do weigh loads after about quarter of a mile!! Still love it though.

Cheers.

[Scott]

148 miles sounds about right....
Are you sure that the tap wasn't set to reserve in the first place ? I did that once on my GS

Otherwise it could be a problem with the fuel tap..I'm no expert but in a situation like this it is normally down to "user error" ..speaking from experience
I don't know how you'd check the tap, but a good place to start would be the .pdf manual posted on here somewhere.

[squirrelciv]

Used to get 165-175 before reserve on my '95 Dommie until the laser exhaust, now down to 155-165 Do still have 4ltrs of reserve to go though. The tap on my bike is engraved with what position is what, have a look at yours to see if you put her on reserve to start with.

[Stilgoe]

No, pretty sure it was turned to "ON" which is at the 12 o'clock position. I,ve had this problem before when I purchased a 1989 ZXR750H1 . That did exactly the same thing - now that was a beast to push about!!! That turned out to be a crappy tap. Don't know how you guys get 156 before reserve , and thats on the smaller 13.5 tank!!

[Jaffa-cake]

i'm pretty sure the 12 o clock position is reserve, the tap should be facing down for on.....

[Scott]

Just checked the fuela tap on my 2000 model and....

12 o'clock is ON
3 o'clock is OFF
6 o'clock is RES

[Jaffa-cake]

yes but on the tap itself the arrow points towards ON when the tap is at 6 o clock

[Scott]

Ahh, I get you....it's relative I suppose , in that however you interpret the tap position's

[samwise]

I just got 130 to reserve with the small tank, so I'm aiming for similar when I get on the motorways and A-roads in the UK and France in just over a month (Yorskhire for a long weekend in May, Aix-en-Provence for a week in June and Cortina in July for a week).

I'd probably get slightly more with a steady throttle opening cruising along instead of going up and down the box like I do over here, but the Alpos panniers will probably take the edge off that once I've received and fitted them

[Stilgoe]

Hey guess what. It was as suggested above .12'oclock is already reserve!! I'll only do that once.


I hope.
Cheers for your theorys anyway.