Starter Lockout Switch, etc.

hey guys, i'm new to the forum and to kz ownership in general and i have a few questions.

first off, i seem to have an issue on my 76 kz650. i'm pretty sure it's a simple short somewhere i haven't found yet, but i just do not get anything from my electrical system. i know that's vague. but when i first bought the bike i was able to get a neutral light and get the headlight working. now i get nothing.

when the key is off, a test light works as it should. touching the lead to the positive post on the battery and the clip to the frame, i get a light. but when you turn the key on it's the opposite. the negative post lights up the light. i also get voltage on both sides of my points and through the wrong side of the coils. the ignition wire to the coils gets current like it should, but it also comes back through the coils as if from the spark plugs, which makes sense since they're grounded and apparently my frame has voltage on it haha.

i have had the wire harness out completely and traced every wire and hooked it back up EXACTLY the way my diagram shows to do it.

the other thing i find weird is that on the diagram, on the left control side is a "starter lockout switch". i'm assuming this is through the clutch so that you have to pull in the clutch for the electric start to work, except my bike has no such switch. it does not even have the wires running to the left handlebar that the diagram says should be there. i don't think that should matter, since my wire goes directly from the starter button to the solenoid, instead of from the button to the lockout switch, then to the solenoid.

i just think it's weird that my bike is different.

i also want to just make my own harness from scratch that eliminates all switches, warning lights, etc. which i know how to do except for the fact that kawasaki used a separate regulator and rectifier instead of a combined unit like they should have, and that's what confuses me. normally you just run a wire from your battery, one from the ignition, and one from your starter button all to your solenoid. kawasaki has one from the battery, the starter button, and the rectifier. this wire connects to a black and yellow wire that i'm pretty certain is just the common ground for all of the system. is that correct?

i just don't understand why the hot wire goes directly to the battery from the rectifier instead of through the regulator, which is what i thought kept the battery from overcharging. how can the regulator regulate the DC voltage to the bike's circuits if it has a wire coming directly from the ac generator instead of from the rectifier?

i know that's a ton of stuff there, but i'm sure some of you guys here are familiar with what i'm looking at haha.

and for the record the bike has been sitting quite a while. i replaced the points and condensers and went through the wiring which appears to be mostly untouched. i just hope i haven't fried the points and condensers now if theres a short somewhere. could a stuck starter or solenoid cause a short?

ok i actually figured out some of my own questions. i realize now how the regulator senses the voltage, through the brown wire from the ignition.

my question then, is the wire going from the rectifier to the solenoid a ground, negative wire?

and could my short i seem to have be a bad regulator which is stuck in "short mode" thinking that the voltage is too high? i know that they regulate the voltage by shorting some of the current back to the ground.

and i still don't get why my bike is missing a whole switch that they're all supposed to have. the wire going from the starter button to the solenoid looks pretty factory.

anyways sorry to reply to my own post so quick, but i figured i could simplify my question a bit.

thanks

..no connection to solenoid and rectifer

You need a year specific manual. It's too easy to get into trouble using one for many years. I wouldn't cut out the wiring. It's a balanced system. They didn't start adding the "safety" features until later. Dumb crap like head light always on, interlock and such. If a guy doesn't know to pull in the clutch when it is in gear, he has no business riding. You're right the brown wire goes to the switch and some lights like the neutral and oil light. Could be a bad connection. On a 40 year old bike, that's likely. I've done away with the separate Reg/Rect. to the modern system. It's easy to do. There is still a brown wire going to the switch and lights.
Steve

doh.

JoeC650, the original poster with the question, hasn't visited this site since May, 2012. I suspect he found a solution or, more likely, sold the bike. Ed

:ohmy:

maybe he's still working on it

martin_csr wrote: doh.

:woohoo: