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.

Bob Dylan on the juke box

When Tony saw the blog yesterday he got all excited and contacted me to say he was coming soon up to help pull that engine.

After a couple of e-mails he decided he's coming Sunday, for a couple of days and wants to get the Honda running, or at the least help work on it some.

So I put Bob Dylan on the juke box (Zune) got the tools out and stripped that baby down carefully and methodically.....taking notes, making sketches, and labeling, and now the engine is ready to come out. All I need is the horse power.

Have I mentioned that "Zen and The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance" isn't really about fixing motorcycles.

Let's try this again.

After a long hiatus I pulled out the bike and the tools and started to tear into it again. It's been a good long while so I spent a fair amount of time looking at what was what and what went where because I was afraid i wouldn't remember after all this time. Then I started taking things apart. Worked for a couple of hours until I got down to the nitty-gritty and decided to stop and start fresh another day. Most of what I removed today was stuff that I had removed previously, then re-installed when I decided I wasn't going to mess with the kick-starter, but since I now have a kick-starter shaft, I may as well put it in...just in case I'm not able to get the electrical starting system fixed.


I got to the point where, if I went much farther the engine was coming out and I wasn't ready for that. I'm not sure I can manhandle it out by myself...in fact I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't be real smart to try.



Next step will be unhooking and labeling all the wires and hoses and cables.