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Second Time and Second Look

Feb 23, 2014

The last chapter ended with a promise to show the install of the  rear-set foot pegs and we will, but first the joyful optimism of  successfully re-wiring the bike by hand has to be reeled in. Oh yes. All the circuits worked, at least the ones which I changed wires. but when I was done the bike would barely run.

What went wrong? Sometimes half the spark plugs would fire and then sometimes the other set of plugs would fire. Learning a lot as I go, I found out how the bike can run on four cylinders when there’s two sets of points and two coils. Each set of points fires once per revolution. On the compression stroke and once again on the exhaust stroke – this is called ‘wasted spark’. Doing this alleviates the need for a separate set of points for each cylinder or to have a distributor like a car does. This might be too complicated for this writing, but it turned out after a lot of trial and error testing and advice from the swell folks at kz650.info, I found one set of points was never making spark at the coil for two cylinders. No matter how precisely I adjusted the gap and dwell angle, no dice. So I purchased a new set, as something must be wrong – and it was. Not with the set I replaced, because the new ones did the same thing, but  finally I found the trouble. The black wire that runs from the coil to the points was grounded out. I substituted a new wire in its place, primed the carbs with fresh gas and vaROOM, vaROOOM !

Enough bla bla words – here’s some pictures and hopefully a minimal amount of accompanying text.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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