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Well crap.....

W

wymple

Forum Sage
Past Site Supporter
I spent the whole of last week getting my 81 850 ready for a local rally. Worked on the exhaust, new tire, painted some parts up, beefed up the clutch with some new springs, etc. Got everything packed on the bike, rode it 1.6 miles to the gas station, topped off the tank, headed out......for 2 seconds. :mad::cry: The ignition died. Not one pop. I had a similar episode a week ago but after a minute it fired back up and didn't repeat with a couple hundred miles down. Parked it off to the side, went back home and drug out the XS650 trike. Swapped everything over, got maybe 10 miles, and the chain broke and literally exploded.:mad::mad::mad:. This is ruining my weekend. Ended up going in the damn car. As to the GS, after the rally today I took a trailer to pull it home, and it fired immediately and ran as if nothing was ever wrong. OK, now I'm finally ****ed. If it would stay broken I could find the problem and fix it, now I'm guessing. It never sputters or misses a single beat, it either runs or it doesn't. All other power is still there, just the ignition loss. If it were a loose or corroded connection I think I should see some intermittent sputtering and misfires, no? Electronic ignition doesn't recover like this, does it? It hadn't really warmed up enough to think it's heat related. 1 1/2 miles on the highway in low 60's weather, no rain or anything for moisture issues. Any ideas on where to begin with this, I can't trust it to take off and it's my DDD this year. (Designated daily driver).
 
wymple said:
I spent the whole of last week getting my 81 850 ready for a local rally. Worked on the exhaust, new tire, painted some parts up, beefed up the clutch with some new springs, etc. Got everything packed on the bike, rode it 1.6 miles to the gas station, topped off the tank, headed out......for 2 seconds. :mad::cry: The ignition died. Not one pop. I had a similar episode a week ago but after a minute it fired back up and didn't repeat with a couple hundred miles down. Parked it off to the side, went back home and drug out the XS650 trike. Swapped everything over, got maybe 10 miles, and the chain broke and literally exploded.:mad::mad::mad:. This is ruining my weekend. Ended up going in the damn car. As to the GS, after the rally today I took a trailer to pull it home, and it fired immediately and ran as if nothing was ever wrong. OK, now I'm finally ****ed. If it would stay broken I could find the problem and fix it, now I'm guessing. It never sputters or misses a single beat, it either runs or it doesn't. All other power is still there, just the ignition loss. If it were a loose or corroded connection I think I should see some intermittent sputtering and misfires, no? Electronic ignition doesn't recover like this, does it? It hadn't really warmed up enough to think it's heat related. 1 1/2 miles on the highway in low 60's weather, no rain or anything for moisture issues. Any ideas on where to begin with this, I can't trust it to take off and it's my DDD this year. (Designated daily driver).
Click to expand...
Check you kill switch terminals, happened to mine a while ago. They were JUST sitting on the contacts and a bump would short them out.
 
I think a bad contact in the kill switch would prevent the starter from working. The only thing I lose is ignition, and it's only died at engine speeds just off idle. Like you shut it off, then no start. Bumps & such have no effect. I rode it down a patchy piece of highway tonight and it ran perfectly, not a hiccup. I'd rather it went ahead and croaked so I could isolate the problem. I checked for petcock issues as well, tried the prime setting to be sure I had fuel to the carb bank. It will be a day or so before I sit down with it, I am just looking for clues.
 
"....a bad connection somewhere going to the coils."

This is what I'd suspect -are you a killswitch user ?
 
I had an issue crop up last year with cyl 1 & 4, found one of the orange wires on my coil had a bare spot and corrosion started to creep up in there... fixed it and the problem went away. If you saw my recent posts, i'm switching to a dyna set up.
 
Check the tension in the connectors on the coils.

I have seen some that looked good, but were loose enough to jiggle around at certain engine speeds.

.
 
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