S.O.S.

The last week or two have been rather disappointing to say the least.
After the last successful rides (which were almost two weeks ago now) I basically haven't been able to get her running again.
At first it was starting but idling only on the left cylinder. We did some tinkering with carb settings trying to be sure both were synced but, and we cleaned the air filters which were pretty nasty, and we put it all back together and then we swapped the wires for the condensers and the spark plug wires to see if that would get the right cylinder firing and tell us if the one cylinder thing was electrical or mechanical...
And now she's just dead in the water. Won't start at all. Switched everything back and still nothing.
It seems that there is spark at both points, but it seems weak at best, and weaker (to the point of maybe being intermittent) on the right. Same at the plug. Spark on both, weaker on the right.
I don't totally know what I'm looking at, but I have to say that the spark doesn't look all that healthy on the left when you get right down to it but like I say, I haven't got any real experience with it.
We've tried disconnecting different circuits to see if something was maybe shorting out and causing a drain on the power, and that hasn't helped.
Tried some new condensers, and that didn't seem to make any difference either.
The condensers and coils seem to pass the bench tests outlined in the Clymer manual, but from what I understand those aren't necessarily definitive as to whether the coil is good or not.
I guess we need to pull the air-boxes back off and see if something we did back there knocked something loose, but it doesn't seem like there was anything that much back there that would prevent it from starting.
At this point we're kind of at a loss and lacking a solid strategy that makes much sense.

As veiwed from the side-car of the Ural

Sometimes a step backward is really a step in the right direction.
Tony and I had been piddling around with the Honda some for a couple of days without a lot of success. To be honest it was kind of a half hearted piddle, until yesterday.
For a few days it was: try to start it, it catches briefly and dies, and we are looking at on-line trouble shooting guides to find the symptoms...fires up and then just quits. Gradually it gets to sounding a progressively worse, until it gets to the point where sometimes it starts to sound like the starter clutch isn't actually engaging all the time. Then Thursday we began trying to get it started via the kick starter, forsaking the convenience of the electric starter to avoid hearing the sound. The results were the same until...it just locked up. Totally locked up.
In my mind I was thinking that it was the same old problem with the alternator/starter clutch.
So yesterday I pulled the left cover and sure enough... The new starter sprocket retaining plate was bent, the sprocket had just about totally disengaged from the starter clutch, and the starter chain was bound up against the side of the crank-case housing and tight as a banjo string (I used to have a banjo so I know how tight the strings are and that's not just a trite expression I'm throwing around loosely.) For some reason one of the screws attaching the starter clutch to the alternator rotor had backed out (I lock-tited them) and forced the sprocket out of position. This was a problem with this bike before I got it, and after seeing what happened this time I'm figuring this is how the kick-starter shaft got broken in the first place.
I don't know why these screws won't stay tight, I just know they won't and I may be at the point that I don't care.
We take all that mess out, (by the way, all the parts I've been ordering and waiting on for the last month were in that little sub-assembly), readjust the idle screws on the carbs back to the point that someone recommended either here or on facebook, and kick her over and...whoa! Fires right up and is idling smoothly at 1400 rpm! We repeat this several times just to be sure it wasn't a fluke, and it fires up everytime with one or two kicks.
So we spend an hour or so checking and adjusting the brakes and adjusting the clutch (is the sweet-spot on the clutch adjustment really that hard to hit?) before deciding that we've reached the point that there's nothing left to do but to do it.
Tony follows in the Ural and Desiree records the event on her i-phone from the side car.

And now some questions...
At the end it died. The ride was just over a mile. I was just going around the block so luckily when it died we were only about 200 yards from the house.
It seemed to be running pretty well initially. Plenty of power, plenty of pick-up, but after about 3/4 mile it strated coughing and missing pretty bad.
When it stopped the battery was dead. No horn, no nothing.
We pushed it up the street a ways and when we got almost back Tony tried it and the horn was working and it fired up (less than 5 minutes elapsed.)
So, what to look for now? Not charging? Dead short? Where should I start looking and what testing can be done?

Do it right the first time...or do it over

I was kind of embarrassed to admit it the other day but...
I did mention that it took me the best part of an hour to figure out how to get the first air box on the other day.  What I didn't mention was that I wound up taking it back off the next day.
Friday I put on the left side of the air cleaner.  Then I started to install the carburetors.  I put the left side on first since I was already on that side having just put the air cleaner on, and I found it rather awkward to work on.  The whole time I was tightening up the inside mounting bolt on that left carburetor I was thinking to myself; "How am I ever going to be able to get the other carb on, there's not going to be any room to work."
So I tried it for a while before I reluctantly admitted that the only way I was going to be able to get in there to tighten that inside bolt and hook the right throttle cable up was to take the right side of the air cleaner back off and bolt the mounting flange on first.  Then the loosely assembled carb and air cleaner went back on with no problem and it wasn't nearly as hard getting the air cleaner back on after I'd had all that practice.
Maybe that is the way it's supposed to go....maybe that's what the manual says and I just missed it...most likely the  manual says "installation is the reverse", and since it's been three months or more since I took it apart...
I'm actually amazed that I haven't had more trouble finding everything after all that time what with boxes of parts getting more or less randomly moved around and shoved into various cabinets and closets during little fits of tidying up the garage now and then over the last few months.