Saturday 28 November 2009

Technical Update

I received my DC1-11 from Borut (zeeltronic), and installed it today, and it works fine, it basically replaces the charging coils on the stator with some electronics taking power directly from the battery. I tried the bike up the road, and it was a little rich, so I went back down to 350 mains, which seemed to sound a lot crisper. The Yam will now go under the covers, and the RG500 is now in position to get worked on!

Next job will be removing the heads, barrels and valves from the bike to send them off for a tune!

Monday 16 November 2009

More technical stuff


Well I rewound the low rpm coil (3000 turns) of 0.14 diameter wire. The guys at the local winding shop lent me the complete reel of wire as they couldn't be bothered to run of 200 metres for me.

In the meantime I removed the head, and replaced the head gasket with a more recent one, but nothing untoward under the head - all OK.

Finally I replace the old stator with my rewound race stator (see pic) and low and behold it works fine. so I had troubleshot to the right component after all. All that bugggering about with the carbs and head etc... and it was the good old stator the whole time!

Anyway, my good friend Borut from Zeeltronic, has another technical trick up his sleeve. He produces a box that will convert the battery current to a sufficient level to feed the Capacitors, giving a flat steady current to the CDI, which he convinced me would be better than changing stators every other race, so I let myself be convinced, and I have one on order - I am really excited about this, because although it means I have to keep the battery it means I can use a significantly lightened flywheel and race stator (even without the CDI charging coils), and I will have great sparks!

http://www.zeeltronic.com/page/dci-11.php
Fantastic.

Thursday 12 November 2009

Technical Update

So after testing, the bike is still not reving and it could be worse, so back to my old stator, which of course means I still have a problem.

After reading a couple of threads on a RD 350 forum, I was convinced that my problem must be coming from a broken reed valve, so I pulled the carbs and the Vforce reeds, but to no avale. Everything was Ok, and the pistons looked good from the carb side, so I am less and less convinced about a broken ring, or something. 

next troubleshooting steps are to pull the head and see if I have a leaky head gasket, and find a decent stator (there are two on ebay this week). I have also unwound the "low rpm" coil, on the race stator, and I will re-wind that with new wire. For information there are 3211 windings on the coil, and the wire used is smaller than the other coil I rewound, so I will need to find a supplier! The average diameter of a winding is approx. 6.5 cms, so that gives a length of approx 201 metres!

Saturday 7 November 2009

Technical Update

Well, I got my high temperature tape, and fibre glass insulation from a Grenoble shop ISOVAC, enabling me to finish the stator, which I put on today. The bike started OK, but runs rough at low rpm aswell as high rpm, so I put back the original stator, and the bike started fine. I really can't tell just starting it in the garage if cleaning out the carbs (I did find some dirt in the power jets) which could correspond to a high rpm misfire, anyway the weather is so rough (pissing it down all week), I couldn't take it up the road so, I will have to see if something has miraculously fixed my problem....

I am going to replace the rear master cylinder on the RG500 with just a tube, basically just to make it a bit more racey, and because it will save some weight.

Update you later....