Tweet
Ballast resistor POS bike problem RESOLVED!!
Problem is now resolved, unbelievably complicated. My cousin Terry came over again, armed with about 3 ft. of wire and a multimeter and proceeded to trace EVERY SINGLE wire on the bike in the ignition circuit.
We checked every piece of equipment, and it all checked out including primary and secondary coil leads, pickup coil resistance etc etc. He then said "This bike HAS to run, it's got gas and voltage into the coils, which MUST fire or else they are no good." All wires too and from the TCI check out, and so does all the electronics.
He turned on the key and the bike fired right up. That left us puzzled because after exactly 10 minutes the bike croaked again, and he looked at the multimeter. The voltage dropped from 11.9 to 5 volts on the coils which he said was not supposed to happen. He then backtracked through everything and isolated the resistor, the diode connections in the TCI ( by way of the connections to the starter solenoid), declared it all good.
We know this is heat related he said, so we'll check everything again while it's all hot. After checking all the TCI connections again while hot, he found one of the pickup coils was now open. That's odd, it checked fine while cold. So using some electronic cleaner which is alcohol based, I sprayed the crap out of the pickup coil and blew on it, which really cooled it off. As Terry watched the multimeter, it flickered and went from open to .760 resistance which is what it's supposed to read. Ah ha!!!! Found it!!!
So thanks to all who made suggestions about using a cooling spray to isolate electronic parts, and those who kept saying check the pickup coils, I would like to say thanks. We did check the pickup coils numerous times while it was cold, and they checked out good, but we never did when it was hot. So now I will be phoning Sid to see if he has a spare pickup coil, because it is the actual coil intself (windings inside) NOT the connections, they were good.
So now I won't call it a POS anymore, I'll just call it a stubborn sneaky devious black bas**rd instead.
Courtney
We checked every piece of equipment, and it all checked out including primary and secondary coil leads, pickup coil resistance etc etc. He then said "This bike HAS to run, it's got gas and voltage into the coils, which MUST fire or else they are no good." All wires too and from the TCI check out, and so does all the electronics.
He turned on the key and the bike fired right up. That left us puzzled because after exactly 10 minutes the bike croaked again, and he looked at the multimeter. The voltage dropped from 11.9 to 5 volts on the coils which he said was not supposed to happen. He then backtracked through everything and isolated the resistor, the diode connections in the TCI ( by way of the connections to the starter solenoid), declared it all good.
We know this is heat related he said, so we'll check everything again while it's all hot. After checking all the TCI connections again while hot, he found one of the pickup coils was now open. That's odd, it checked fine while cold. So using some electronic cleaner which is alcohol based, I sprayed the crap out of the pickup coil and blew on it, which really cooled it off. As Terry watched the multimeter, it flickered and went from open to .760 resistance which is what it's supposed to read. Ah ha!!!! Found it!!!
So thanks to all who made suggestions about using a cooling spray to isolate electronic parts, and those who kept saying check the pickup coils, I would like to say thanks. We did check the pickup coils numerous times while it was cold, and they checked out good, but we never did when it was hot. So now I will be phoning Sid to see if he has a spare pickup coil, because it is the actual coil intself (windings inside) NOT the connections, they were good.
So now I won't call it a POS anymore, I'll just call it a stubborn sneaky devious black bas**rd instead.
Courtney
Comment