Thanks for all the good advice from all of you. I finally got the old girl going and she's been running strong for 4 days now. Turns out it was a fuel feed problem of some kind (I think). The vaguely cylindrical object is my fuel pump, as near as I can tell, even though I still haven't been able to find it in the manual. But I took it mostly apart, dumped fuel, put it all back together, and installed it properly (it certainly wasn't sitting in the space in which it was supposed to be sitting), and the bike started pretty much right up considering it had been sitting since January 1. So now I have to fix the more mundane problems like cam chain rattling and etc. Thanks again everybody, I'll try to be around a little more regularly just to add my witty repartee into the mix. And certainly to ask for more advice.

 

Cool,have you done the balancer adjustmentment?

 

Glad you found it Ddog.

 

Mark, sorry, what's a balancer adjustment?