Saturday 16 August 2014. There's hope yet ...

Started work on the Widowmaker today. The 24 year old Suzuki simply stopped a few weeks ago and it has been rather disheartening. To allow time without pressure I de-registered the bike and cancelled the insurance. It was a good move because without the pressure of wasting time, I tend to work slower and more thoroughly.

Last week I did a few tests on different electrical systems and it felt like a broken wire on the pickup/induction coil. However I've basically stripped of the side covers, tanks, seat etc to check the whole wiring and can see that to make the bike much more reliable and robust, lots of the wiring needs to be changed out and now I can do that properly.

Once I had the stator cover off I could see the problem. The green cable from the induction coil was simply broken. I would guess that the solder connected had failed.Overall, the connections were in poor conditions and that would explain the occassional tachometer issue and the bike just stopping becuse the induction pickup tells the CDI unit, basically a primitive computer, when to send a spark to the spark plugs.

Here are pictures of the break.



Now thinking this through, I reckon that the failing wire must have meant that the spark plugs were not firing on every cycle and that would have meant less power. Therefore fixing this issue should mean that not only will the bike be more reliable but it must also produce a better spark and thus more power. Fingers crossed.