Good lord, if its not one thing, its another! Dead cylinder

[bobotech]

I am getting rather annoyed but still hopeful that I can get this beast to run well. So I have done all sorts of crazy work on this thing as you can tell by my annoying amount of newbie posts.

Well I changed the points and now I'm getting a dead cylinder. No, I have not put the old point back yet, it started pouring outside and I have not checked the spark plug but here is where I'm at.

The bike runs surprisingly well even on 2 cylinders. It even idles well and moves my giant fat ass around with some oomph however I have been noticing that the bike has been vibrating and shaking when I slowly rev it up. Most noticeable in the 1k to 3k range.

Well when I have my timing light hooked up to the left cylinder and start the bike, I get nothing. If put the key on "run" with the bike off and manually trip the breaker while its on the low point, the timing light won't fire however I can hear a faint sparking from the point. if I put the key on "run" and test the right cylinder and do the same thing with the timing light and manually tripping the breaker, the timing light DOES flash.

I swapped out the condensers and that didn't make a difference. I checked the wiring with my ohm meter and I get solid connectivity on the white wire to the plugs in the harness by the oil pump (the white wire is the left cylinder). I then took the coils off the bike. I get decent resistance across 2 of the coils, roughly 9.51 ohms (remember though, i have non-resistor wires and plug caps in there) and on the left cylinder, i get about 9.11 ohms. The left cylinder coil reads jsut slightly lower than the other 2, could that be the problem? I checked resistance across the spark plug wire and the wires on the harness plug.

I just pulled the plug and its wet with gas but otherwise looks normal. I have not tested it out of the cylinder yet but I'm going to do that tomorow when its dryer out.

[jabcb]

Where did you get 9.51 & 9.11 ohms? Coil primary resistance should be around 4 ohms & secondary resistance should be over 10k ohms.

Check how you connected up the left point. Maybe you have the insulators and spade connector in the wrong order.

[Coyote]

Check how you connected up the left point. Maybe you have the insulators and spade connector in the wrong order.

+1. The most common cause. With the bike off, use your meter and check the reading with the points closed (point to point). Now hold the points open with a tooth pick or similar. Check again. If you get approximately the same reading, you are shorted at the pig tail

[bobotech]

I fixed it. When i was putting my coils back, I noticed that one of the pins on the harness plug was actually pushed out. it was one of the end orange wires on the 6 pin plug that connects the main harness to the coiil pack. Pushed it back in so it clicked and then put everything back together and now its running better.

However i am now noticing that the bike isn't charging my battery. Arugh. I wonder if its my battery, I'm going to test that next.

[smoketriples]

Probably not the battery if it's not charging. Might want to clean up those block connectors under the left side cover and make sure all of those pins are going all the way in.

If not the manual has all the fun test stuff for rotor, stator, etc.

As usual, I have that stuff here too....i have a lot of 550 stuff that I haven't gotten around to putting on fleabay yet.

-Eric

[bobotech]

Well I kind of found out what is happening. The headlight ears on my bike aren't grounded. Well thats not true, the right side are grounded but the left side are not. So what was happening was that electricity was back feeding into the harness when the lights were on. The main red wire was getting really hot to the point of smoking so I turned it off quickly. If the lights were off, it was okay.

The process was this. I drove the bike for a short distance and it died on me (my fault) and it would not restart. I am using the wrong thrust washer on my kick starter so I can't kick start it. So i wakled it back to my house.

Once there, I charged the battery and took the cover off the voltage regulator.

I started the bike and checked voltage across the battery posts. I was getting about 12.8 to 12.9 when the bike was revved up to at least 3k+. At idle I was getting 12.2 to about 12.4. So not enough to charge the battery. At that point I discovered that the positive wire by the key switch was getting very hot.

Now remember, my bike has dual filament bulbs in the front turn signals (not original) so I had hooked them up to a connector but the connector apparently wasn't the correct connnector but it allowed things to sort of work but then was causing a semi-short which lead to the overly hot power wire which is a big deal. I noticed that the left side blinker was the oddball and wasn't working the way the right side was. I took the wiring apart to see how they were hooked up. I had 2 black wires coming into the headlight bucket from each turn signal assembly, one for each filament and the actual turn signal assembly was grounded to the ground on the bulb socket. I figured out what happened was that I tapped into the speedo/tach lighting circuit for the secondary filament in the turn signals so I could have running lights. However since the turn signal assembly wasn't grounded, the electricity was looking for a place to go so it found the path of least resistance and was causing havoc up front which then caused the charging circuit to only put out about 12.3-12.9 volts max.

Once I unhooked the front turn signals, the charging jumped up to about 13.9 at 3k and 13.4 or so at idle however that was after I was playing around with adjusting the voltage regulator. If its nicer tomorow, once I get all the wiring back in place, I am going to readjust the voltage regulator back up/down to 13.5 at idle and hopefully closer to 14.3 or so at 3k.

Sorry for such a long post.