Okay, I finally found some spare time to get in there.

My suspicion was that it was flywheel related, given the history of these engines and all. I also could engage the starter and it just free spun, so I knew something was up. The engine still had compression as well, pointing me further towards something with the flywheel.

Then I found this person with a similiar experience on another forum:

So it was time to take the Vulcan out for a longer and more accurate shakedown of how it would spend it's life. I hopped on the bike and took the hour long commute into work that I drive every day. It's all highway driving and at a good speed, so it's highly representative of what the motorcycle would be enduring. It rode fairly well the entire way, with nothing blatantly wrong, although there were some quirks here or there and it felt anemic on power...

Despite the relatively steady progress I had initially with the bike, completing the Vulcan 500 brought me to a near standstill. Perhaps it was the other projects I had going on, perhaps it was returning to work full time again after my injury... or maybe I was just stalling on the bike until my leg worked well enough to actually ride the beast. Whatever the story may be...

So the story of the Taurus 740 contiues, although this is a rather short section. I'd continually read that Taurus customer service sucks, and I have to agree at this point per my experiences. They're relatively numerous thus far, and I hope they do not continue to get worse.

The bikes runs and lives and is all put back together! It even looks nice!

Cabin fever will make you do crazy things. Fortunately for me, my crazy is limited to hobling around my garage on crutches and highly addictive pain killers trying to fix up a motorcycle... the very same kind of contraption that got me on those crutches to begin with. I obviously don't learn lessons like I should.

First and foremost, I had to get the gas in the tank out. It's surely been there since 2004, gross. I dumped it all out, and the gas was brown and muddy. Not a great sign at all... I then washed the gas tank out lightly with water, and hit the interior as much as I could with an air compressor to blow it out. Next up I hit it with a heat gun for about 20-30 minutes or so to dry it out thoroughly. Lastly, I took a pencil propane torch into the puppy and tried to burn out any remaining gas. There was none to be found it would seem. Success... oh wait...