Difficulty starting ... need opinions please!

[Addy Leung]

When I picked my old bike 81' GSX1100EX, I have following problems making the bike hard to start. Hope this may help.
1/ Starter motor is defective but still turn when starting. One of the magnet inside the starter motor is loss and stick on the rotor. With a good and new battery, it is no problem. But if the battery after three months old and the bike is warm up and hot, it can not turn at all until the bike is cool down and also draw a lot of current from the battery and making the battery DC voltage very low and this low Voltage is not enough for the ignition unit to make sparking on the spark plug. Sometime the starter relay will heat up after a several long starts and it melt the cables contact with it.
A second hand starter is replaced but same result, as it is not willing to turn. This starter has no 4 permanent magnets in it. It use 4 electrical wounds as electro-magnets. Open the starter up for checking, one thick wiring is broken and making one pair electro-magnets defective. After soldering the wiring back, it turn very good and only draw normal current.

2/ the R/R is defective, only little charging. New R/R is replaced with the stator also. The two output wirings from the R/R is directly wired up the battery terminals.

3/ the 4 carburetor rubber boots mounted to engine heads are aged and cracked underneath ( you can not easily see it, only if you take it out to check) and making it lead when starting engine, and it also hard to syn the carbs.

After fixed all these problems, I can even start the engine with head light on together the engine warm up and hot.

[Planecrazy]

Steve,

First of all, I have to agree with Earl. He's hardly ever (never?) wrong. Then I think it would also be worthwhile to install a relay that shuts off the headlight when the starter button is pushed. This makes an extra 55 or 60 watts available for the starter motor. Also, installing a relay that bypasses the ignition switch will give you an additional volt or so for the whole electrical system. I installed both of these relays a couple years ago and my bike has never turned over better.

Joe

By process of deduction I too agree with Earl's assessment (Thanks, Earl!). That means I have to find a good weekend day to motor over to your place, Joe, and hopefully take care of both jobs at the same time. This is not an area of expertise for me, so although I intend to check my service manual for parts list, etc, I'd appreciate advice as to what I need to bring with me that day... If I'm not mistaken, Labatts is at the top of that list?

Thanks in advance!
Steve 8)

PS. We already discussed the relay option, and I'd like to get that done as well, but probably not that day... not enough time, methinks.