TheRepoGuy
Well-known member
It’s a long one but y’all might get a laugh out of it!
I swear - this girl is going to be the death of me!
Let me preface by the little back history. I bought this 1985 Interstate essentially In pieces; she’s taken me about a month and a half of putting everything back together to get it where it’s at today, but if it’s not one damn thing wrong it’s another!
Last weekish the starter took a crap and let out the magic smoke in the neutral diode which I found out after I removed the front cover it cooked the wires all the way down almost into where it goes in front of the belt covers; fixed that and bought a new diode which didn’t do anything because now the bike won’t display it’s in neutral so something there is wonky (yay! [emoji849][emoji849][emoji849])
THEN - because I’m not super familiar with timing and all that other fun stuff on one of these old girls I didn’t realize the T marks on the fly wheel needed to be lined up before I changed the belts; pulled the carb off for the 10th time to fix a leaky bowl and realized I needed to check the timing marks which it wasn’t even CLOSE to lined up right - Dammit! [emoji2357]
Fixed that and Ive got that situated now so I think I’m good! Yeah no, curve ball number 2975021 from Her gets thrown at me!
I knew the stock coils were fried; had a good reading on the old multimeter for the primary coils (after realizing the wires on my coils were backwards, right side gets the yellow left side gets the blue and another FACEPALM moment) pulled the coils off and replaced them with a set a friend of mine gave me which were also STELLAR on the primary but fried on the secondary, Double facepalm!!
SO! By now, I’ve replaced EVERYTHING electric on this bike, the CDI, Voltage Regulator, All the boxes and dohickeys that have a plug in have been replaced with NOS parts, all the connections were cleaned and I added a bit of dielectric grease to them, spliced and soldered the stator wires to eliminate that potential problem, re-wired the ENTIRE bike from the back to the front, replaced all of the incandescent bulbs on this thing with LED’s, replaced the battery with a nice AGM setup and checked, double checked even called the other half to check that everything looked good; talked to my local mechanic friend who I bought this girl from and he says “yeah, I think you’ve pretty well got a new “old” bike!”
Kick the starter over, have spark at all four plugs (thank god) and go figure - she doesn’t want to crank. WELL &$@&$&!!!! I pulled the carb again because when I installed it after fixing the leaky bowl I didn’t fully tighten down the side that was leaking and realized the hard way it was leaking fluid....out come the carbs again, tighten EVERYTHING on the carb down and pull the coils again on a hunch.
You guessed it - THESE coils are screwed too!!
I’m over it! I’ve walked away from this bike a bunch of times because I feel like lighting it on fire and watching it burn sometimes though I’d never actually do that...
While I don’t have the cash on hand to buy new coils at the moment, Ive got a few other things I want to check first before I put her back together AGAIN and pray to the Honda motorcycle gods that she will fire.
Welcome to the walls of my nightmare!
Nate
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I swear - this girl is going to be the death of me!
Let me preface by the little back history. I bought this 1985 Interstate essentially In pieces; she’s taken me about a month and a half of putting everything back together to get it where it’s at today, but if it’s not one damn thing wrong it’s another!
Last weekish the starter took a crap and let out the magic smoke in the neutral diode which I found out after I removed the front cover it cooked the wires all the way down almost into where it goes in front of the belt covers; fixed that and bought a new diode which didn’t do anything because now the bike won’t display it’s in neutral so something there is wonky (yay! [emoji849][emoji849][emoji849])
THEN - because I’m not super familiar with timing and all that other fun stuff on one of these old girls I didn’t realize the T marks on the fly wheel needed to be lined up before I changed the belts; pulled the carb off for the 10th time to fix a leaky bowl and realized I needed to check the timing marks which it wasn’t even CLOSE to lined up right - Dammit! [emoji2357]
Fixed that and Ive got that situated now so I think I’m good! Yeah no, curve ball number 2975021 from Her gets thrown at me!
I knew the stock coils were fried; had a good reading on the old multimeter for the primary coils (after realizing the wires on my coils were backwards, right side gets the yellow left side gets the blue and another FACEPALM moment) pulled the coils off and replaced them with a set a friend of mine gave me which were also STELLAR on the primary but fried on the secondary, Double facepalm!!
SO! By now, I’ve replaced EVERYTHING electric on this bike, the CDI, Voltage Regulator, All the boxes and dohickeys that have a plug in have been replaced with NOS parts, all the connections were cleaned and I added a bit of dielectric grease to them, spliced and soldered the stator wires to eliminate that potential problem, re-wired the ENTIRE bike from the back to the front, replaced all of the incandescent bulbs on this thing with LED’s, replaced the battery with a nice AGM setup and checked, double checked even called the other half to check that everything looked good; talked to my local mechanic friend who I bought this girl from and he says “yeah, I think you’ve pretty well got a new “old” bike!”
Kick the starter over, have spark at all four plugs (thank god) and go figure - she doesn’t want to crank. WELL &$@&$&!!!! I pulled the carb again because when I installed it after fixing the leaky bowl I didn’t fully tighten down the side that was leaking and realized the hard way it was leaking fluid....out come the carbs again, tighten EVERYTHING on the carb down and pull the coils again on a hunch.
You guessed it - THESE coils are screwed too!!
I’m over it! I’ve walked away from this bike a bunch of times because I feel like lighting it on fire and watching it burn sometimes though I’d never actually do that...
While I don’t have the cash on hand to buy new coils at the moment, Ive got a few other things I want to check first before I put her back together AGAIN and pray to the Honda motorcycle gods that she will fire.
Welcome to the walls of my nightmare!
Nate
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
