Given he's spending his summer repairing, building, and installing big bore kits on scooters (49cc, mostly), it's a little surprising that he wants to hang with me and turn wrenches on a day off. At the end of it, I thanked him for helping me. His response: Thanks for letting me help put the heads back on.
After we finished and heaved the motor up onto the bench and out of the way, I stretched things into the early afternoon and prettied up the valve covers a bit.
I have some pics.
With the motor starting to look like the real deal again, I got inspired to beat my head against the rat's nest of wiring in another futile attempt to get a starter button to bring power down to the starter. After I got back from the office, I grabbed my computer with a good zoomable wiring diagram and some tunes. Zero progress.
Argh is about all I can manage at this point. (I'm imagining the storm cloud above the Peanuts characters signifying anger and frustration.) I've got the wiring diagram up, with plenty of zoom in. I'm chasing things here/there - mostly, I'm chasing my tail.
I seem to be able to manage a couple things that might suggest "progress" of a sort:
- If I disconnect the stop switch installed by the PO because the start button was hosed, I can jump those wires and get the relay to which they're connected to throw. OK. I guess that kill switch is bad. Good to know. Wasn't planning to keep it anyway.
- I "think" I found and attached a crucial wire that runs to the starter solenoid, the green/red one. I don't know why was cut/partly stripped and hiding out behind the battery tray. Together, that wire and the red/yellow one are supposed to activate the solenoid when I push the start button/jump the wires, as I understand. The relay throws (clicks), but I don't get power across to the side of the solenoid running to the starter. (But then, maybe that green/red wire goes into the loom and disappears to nowhere, as it's just another one of the many bypassed and re-wired wires. What fun.)
- Solenoid could be bad, but it's a new one I bought back soon after I picked up this project and discovered an old tractor-type solenoid shoehorned in. Before throwing in the towel for the night, I fished out a spare solenoid from the parts GL we have. It worked the last time I tried turning over that bike.
I'm not going to reinstall the motor UNTIL I sort out this electrical business. There's no point in it, really, and it's just easier to move the bike around the shop without that hunk of metal between the wheels.