I was heading out for a nice spring ride on Saturday, started the bike up, let it warm up for a couple of minutes and as I started moving I had a total power loss – no lights at the gauges with the ignition switch on. [smiley=sad.gif]
The day before, I did some exploratory tinkering with the wiring in the headlight shell in anticipation of replacing my reflector with a spare I got from Rob that would accommodate the little pilot light. (Which I didn’t do at that time because it looked to be more involved than wanted to deal with at that time.) So I checked the ground strap to the speedo bolt and sure enough I had failed to tighten it up and it had slid off. I tightened the ground back and had power again. What I did not have was any ignition happening at all. I pulled a plug and grounded it on the cylinder, cranked the starter and no spark. Curses! No nice spring ride for me! [smiley=furious3.gif]
Between Easter duties yesterday, I checked the headlight wiring to see if I had blundered getting it back together, but everything seemed OK there. So I concluded it was an ignition system failure. I have a fairly new Dyna coil and a fairly new ICU, so my prime suspect is the transistor in the bean can that I got on ebay last year. I did a quick check jumping the center terminal from the plug from the ICU to the bean can and did get a spark at the plug. I may do a swap if my old bean can, which was occasionally functional when I pulled it to see if I can get any spark at the plug. If so, I concluding fer sher that’s the problem. Luckily, I do have a replacement transistor (thanks to Bob Roller). I just need to make time this week to do that job. I know we have some good info on the forum here on bean can repair and well as from Snowbum. Another learning experience!
John M
