Problem with Charlie's Electronic Ignition?

adriennevy · Post by **adriennevy** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 1:46 am

I had an electronic ignition installed on my 65 CB77 at Charlie's Place in December 2012, right before they moved to LA from SF. At that time, the coils, plugs, and wires were replaced, and a regulator was added. The bike had been running brilliantly until last weekend when the right side stopped firing. No spark is coming from the plug, and no power is coming from the wire. Lots of troubleshooting was done. The first thing that I tried was swapping the blue and yellow wires to see what happened. After the switch, the right side started firing and the left stopped. (A swap of the previous symptom.) After testing everything with a multimeter, everything seems fine... but now neither side is sparking.

Tonight I went back through everything with a circuit tester. There is power being delivered to both coils, but for the wires coming out of the coils to the ignition, on the right side the light flickers when the kickstarter is cranked, but the light stays on for the left side. When swapping the yellow and blue wires again (from the electronic ignition) the right stays on and the left flickers...

When I tested the blue and yellow wires coming out of the electronic ignition, it seems like nothing is coming out of either side, even with a crank. But when it was tested a couple days ago with the multi-meter, it appears that the circuit is closed....

Is there something else I should be testing? Does it seem like the ignition is bad? Please help!

adriennevy · Post by **adriennevy** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 12:58 pm

Hi all. I just wanted to update this in case anyone was having the same problem. I emailed Charlie's Place about it and this was Charlie's reply:

"Hi Adrienne,
Sorry to hear you are having these issues. It sounds like you have done a pretty good job of diagnosing your problem. It would indeed seem you have lost function of the right side pickup.
Very good detective work, I might add.
Since you have the original version of the ignition there could be a few different reasons why this has failed. In any case it is unfortunately way past its warranty date. Without personally seeing it I cannot tell you what caused the failure. The most common cause is probably a structural failure due to excessive vibration or maybe even some type of impact beneath the cover, or even possibly if the cover was removed incorrectly at some point. Really hard to say.
We have a new version of the ignition which is easy enough to install yourself. It has some improvements over the original version also. It costs more than the first version, but we would offer it to you at the same price as the original version. We sell these world wide, and most all of them are installed buy the owner of the bike. They also have a much longer warranty.
Let me know if you would like to get that, and we can ship it immediately.
If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask.
Thanks,
-Charlie"

So it looks like I'll be buying a new one!

sarals · Post by **sarals** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 5:46 pm

Your trouble shooting was indeed really good! Sorry to hear you to have buy a new ignition system. Charlie seemed nice about it, none the less.

I have the ignition system that is featured on one of the blogs on this site. I purchased it from LM. So far, so good!