Fairing fitment then engine stops.

Today I spent pretty much the whole day fitting my fairings to the bike.
The fairings are the ABS chinese ones that you can get these days and need a bit of "adjusting" to get everything to line up properly.

I used a grinding stone on the end of a Dremel to open up some holes to take rubber grommets.
I had to drill some holes and rivet on the Dzus  brackets.
I also had to open up the holes were the rear vision mirrors attach.
The RH rear side fairing has a push in spigot for a bung in the tank that is just too big to actually push in
The LH rear side fairing was totally missing the push in spigot for the tank bung. So I will have to sort these out in due course, but it is not a show stopper for now.
It didn't seem like it was going to be a big task, but it sure took some time.
Probably the worst fitting parts are around the rear brake lights. Especially the piece with the seat latch keyhole in it.
Somehow I doubt that the people that make these fairings have actually tried to make improvements to the way the fairings fit the bike.

Anyway here are some pics of the bike with the fairings fitted.
Note that I forgot about the front radiator surround. Ran out of time for it today.

I finished working on it approx. 8pm and I thought I would take it for a spin up to Dave's about 10km away.
I pushed it out of the shed and gave it a kick.
It started and ran for 3 seconds and stopped. It then would not start again.
I was pretty tired, so I just pushed it back into the shed and thought that I will look into it tomorrow.

But after a few minutes, I just couldn't resist a bit of a tinker.
I removed the rear fairings and played around with the TPS plug and also pulled apart and re-twisted up a wire to wire connection on one of the PGM wires that was done in a bit of a hurry when I was swapping PGM's a few days back.
I also put in a fully charged battery from a FXR150. It is a bit too tall to enable the riders seat to go on, but I was still able to connect it up and give the kick start a good kick.

Well the bike fired up and ran sweet.
So I re-assembled the rear fairings and swapped back to the old battery, which doesn't seem to hold its charge all that well, but does still basically work.
The bike still fired up easy enough and ran well.

So I grabbed my helmet and took off up to Dave's just taking it pretty easy. It was now dark
At this stage the rev counter, Speedo and temp gauge are not working.
I need to seal up around the headlight as some light from the headlight leaks back into the riders face at night.

The bike ran well to Dave's where I stopped and had a bit of a chat.
Left Dave's at 10pm and got about 1.5km down the road and the bike stopped as if the kill switch had been flicked.
In the dark I was able to give the TPS connector a bit of a squeeze. But to no avail.
I pushed the bike back to Dave's. This was a bit of an up hill mission.
I left the bike at Dave's and he gave me a ride home in the car.

Got home 11pm and wrote up this post.
Not sure what the problem with the bike is.
It sure was a disappointing end to a reasonably productive day.

All I need to get a Warrant of Fitness (M.O.T, Inspection) is a speedo cable and a park light.

Engine running properly at last.

This afternoon Paul came down from Auckland with a spare PGM-II, a spare set of carbs, a spare wiring loom and a few other bits.

We were about to swap the carbs over when we realised that first we really needed to get the PGM connectors properly sorted.
So we put the bike in the van and headed around to Wob's, as he had an old F3 loom that we could salvage the correct connector plugs from. After a little while, the connectors were fixed, but the bike would not start.

The spare PGM-II was installed and all of a sudden the bike would start reliably with a kick start. Cool.

The bike was now running, but still wasn't quite right. It sounded as though it was too rich and was burbling and not free revving.
We swapped out the carbs and the bike ran beautifully. Even though two tubes to the air valves were not connected.

We connected up the two air valve tubes and plugged in the original PGM-II. The bike ran about 95% sweet. However, it was just noticeable that it wasn't revving as cleanly as it had on Paul's PGM-II. The fact that it ran this well at all was a bit of a surprise, as it was previously not running well at all on the original PGM-II, but now with Paul's carbs on it seemed to be running only slightly rough on the original PGM-II.

We re-connected Paul's PGM-II and the bike ran beautifully again. So clearly my original PGM-II has a slight fault but not bad enough to prevent the bike from running about 95% sweet. Odd?

So at the end of the day, there were 3 main things wrong with my bike when first assembled:
1) Sheared Woodruff key on the flywheel
2) Slightly faulty PGM-II
3) Something not quite right with the carbs. This is yet to be determined. (ended up being missing needle shrouds)
But also the seemingly good battery was just not up to the task and the kill switch had been previously modified so that the connections were backwards. Who would have thunk it. A bit of a torturous combination of problems to overcome, and that's putting it mildly.

But at least I now have the bike running properly. Excellent.

Note that someone had previously tried my original PGM-II on his bike and had reported back that it worked fine. This lead me to believe that there was nothing wrong worth my PGM-II. However, I am sure that if that someone tried it again, with the knowledge that it isn't quite right, he would notice the difference.

Mis-firing problem solved

The mis-firing problem has been found. (but other problems remain)
The Woodruff key locating the flywheel had completely sheared.
Hence the timing was out on both cylinders.
It looks as though I probably did not do up the flywheel bolt tight enough?
Number  "4)"  in the previous post says that I checked the flywheel was located properly. All I did was look to see if I could see the Woodruff key. I didn't actually remove the flywheel. However, if the Woodruff key shears, then all looks OK until the flywheel comes off.

I took the bike around to Wob's to let him hear it run and see what he thought.

After thinking about it for a while, wondering what could make it mis-fire on both cylinders, it seemed likely that the flywheel was not located properly, and upon inspection, it surely was not.

We cleaned off the faces of the Morse taper with Brakleen and put the flywheel back on with a new Woodruff key.
This time I used 3 dollops of lock-tite and did it up nice and tight.
I am used to flywheel bolts having a spring washer, but my setup at least, does not have a spring washer.

Anyway it fired up and ran quite good for about 10 seconds and then dropped onto one cylinder, then stopped.
I got it going with a push start down the hill, and it ran really well, but would keep dropping onto one or zero cylinders, especially at low revs.
I inadvertently pulled a few wheelies in first gear as both cylinders fired up all of a sudden at high-ish revs. Kind of fun.
I will look at it again on another day.

At least I finally got to ride the bike today. It was quite a good feeling. And for those brief moments when it was firing on both cylinders it really did seem to be quite powerful.
Today's session was far from the ideal running in procedure, but I seem to have gotten away with it for now.

Also, we looked at the wires going into the PGM as whoever did the wire splice had made a bit of a mess. One female connector pin in particular was the wrong type and did not click into place properly on the wiring loom plug. I really need to fix these connections properly.

Engine runs rough

At the moment, the engine runs really rough. It was putting out a dense grey smoke but this was because I had set the oil pump up WAY too rich. After setting it properly, the smoke levels returned to normal immediately.
It struggles to rev and huffs and puffs and misfires.
It appears to be running on both cylinders. But running really rough. It will not idle most of the time. Certainly not ride-able.

Initially I thought it was electrical. I pulled apart all the connector blocks and sprayed them with CRC and/or BrakeKleen and/or contact cleaner. I think I have probably done this to each connector block at least 3 times now. I also made sure that the battery was good and fully charged up. I could see spark at both spark plugs and both plugs were getting wet.

1) COILS, CAPS and PLUGS
I checked the resistance of the plug caps and it was zero, so I bought 2 new NGK caps/leads at NZ$42 each, with an inbuilt 5kOhm resistance.(NGK TB05EMA)
This made no difference.

Note that NGK plugs with "R" in their description (such as BR9ECM) means that the plug has an inbuilt 5kohm resistance. I am not too sure if you are supposed to use a 5kohm lead with a 5kohm plug, but that is what I am doing until I learn otherwise. NGK link.

I checked the resistances at the coils and they were zero across the terminals and about 3.3kOhm to lead end.
This gives a total resistance of 3.3k + 5k in the cap = 8.3k.
I know that 3.3kOhm seems a bit low across the HT coil, but a friends bike that was running sweetly measured the same.
I even swapped coils/caps with him, and still no difference.
I got a new set of NGK BR9ES plugs at $8 each and tried them. No difference. (The BR9ECM's were $25 each; I ordered 2 but then the bike shop rang back later and said that they would rather not get them in as they would have to buy a box of 10 and they didn't want to have 8 plugs sitting in the warehouse for ever. Welcome to New Zealand.
I set the plug gaps to 0.6mm
I also checked that the grounding of the earth wires on the wiring loom was good.
I unwrapped the front 2/3rds of the wiring loom and checked that it was all OK.

2) PGM II
I put my PGM on my friends bike and it ran OK. So I guess My PGM is OK

3) TPS
I measured the resistance across the Throttle Position Sensor (both ways) and made sure it made sense.
It varied from around 3kOhm to 5 kOhm from memory.
The power valve drive motor behaves properly with TPS connected and disconnected

4) PICK UPS
I fitted the flywheel pickups and wires from my spare engine. No difference.
I checked that the flywheel was on properly and couldn't float around on the crank giving bad timing signals.

So then I thought, well maybe it is carburation:

5) CARBURETTORS
I fitted a set of carbies from a friends bike that was running OK. No difference.
Both his and my carbs are set to standard settings with slightly different needles BPJ/K instead of BPG/H) and his float level was set to 16mm instead of 13mm.

???)  I am at a loss to explain why it doesn't run properly.
A) Maybe I have made a mistake during engine assembly, but I can't think what.
B) There is no little tacho wiring loom in place, but I seriously doubt that not having the tacho wired up would cause any problems. I actually just disconnected it on my friends bike and it did not affect how it runs.
C) Maybe there is some random problem in the rear part of the wiring loom?
D) I will check the compression on both cylinders tomorrow, just in case that sheds any light on this problem. It feels like good compression with the kick start.
E) I guess it could be a leaky centre main bearing seal, but this is brand new, so seems unlikely. But I guess I will have to do a crankcase pressure test the way things are going.
F) I am running V-Force III reed blocks. I doubt these are the cause of any problems?
G) I am running single ring Wossner RM125 pistons. They have a shorter skirt, but still block the exhaust port entirely at Top Dead Centre.

It is really quite frustrating to have such an elusive problem right at the end of the complete rebuild of this bike. But I guess this can be viewed as perfectly normal?

It goes!

Today I replaced a needle valve in the RH carby before fitting the carbs.
I fitted the two stroke oil tank and exhaust pipes.
The thermostat octopus arrived from Yahoo!Japan via Gary Gower and I fitted that and the radiator and the catch tank.
I put the tank and seat on and after about 6 kicks it fired into life.
The smoke was more grey than blue and very dense out of both pipes. It remained this way for the first two runs of about a minute each at low revs just above idle, then it stopped and wouldn't go again. Probably fouled plugs? Not too sure. Hope the grey smoke doesn't mean water in the system.

Just after first engine start-up

First impression of the dry clutch is that it sounds really crap. Even more so when the clutch is pulled in. But I will come to appreciate it over time I am sure. :-)

Spark at plugs & PV movement. Wanted Parts list.

I finally worked out that the engine kill switch on my bike is wired up completely wrong.
The switch is open when set to "run" and closed when set to "off". This is the reverse of what it should be, and lead me to think that the kill switch wires should be open when trying to set the power valve to the "Hi" position with the TPS disconnected. Wrong!.

In order to set the power valves, you must have the Kill switch set to "run" and this means that the two Black and Black/White wires should be connected. Then with the TPS switch unplugged, turn on the ignition key and the power valve pulley will rotate to where the computer thinks the fully open position for the power valves is. Now you can adjust the cables so that the power valves are exactly in the fully open position.
Note that the TPS connector block is a mongrel of a thing to pull apart.

Finally, after a bit of head scratching due to the incorrect kill switch leading me astray, I have been able to get my power valves operating correctly and now have spark at the spark plugs.

There is now light at the end of the tunnel. I just need to source a few little bits and do some minor work and it will be finished and working.

Things I need to source:
00) Correct kill switch! 03/01/2012 in the post.
01) Mini wiring loom for tacho/temp gauge. (bidding on Yahoo!Japan) 02/04/2012
02) Rear bottom fairing mount bracket.
03) Speedo cable. (bidding on Yahoo!Japan)02/04/2012
04) Radiator cap 06/01/2012 Arrived in post from Paul along with kill switch.
05) Pillion foot pegs. (bidding on Yahoo!Japan) 02/04/2012
06) Upper front RH side fairing mount that also supports small two-stroke oil tank 02/01/2012
07) Dzus fasteners for fairings. (Have fitted some but need more)
08) Rear seat latching mechanism. (bidding on Yahoo!Japan) 02/04/2012
09) Front Park Light and wires. 22/04/2012
10) Radiator bottom bracket. (bidding on Yahoo!Japan)
11) Brake hose clamp on bottom triple clamp. (bidding on Yahoo!Japan)
12) Front brake reservoir mounting bracket.

Things I need to do
1) Tape up the wiring loom after having pulled it apart for thorough inspection 02/01/2012
2) Fit new carby float bowl seals. 04/01/2012 The leaks basically stopped after having petrol in the bowls for a few days.
3) Fix broken air valve wires (green connector block)
4) General assembly of carbs, two-stroke oil tank, radiator, thermostat and radiator overflow tank and exhaust pipes. 04/01/2012
5) Make the fairings fit. Not a small job.

Unfortunately, it is the holiday period so it will take a bit of time to get this sorted out. Maybe about another 2 weeks. There is now nothing but some assembly time stopping me from firing up the engine.      :-)