Charging output low sooty plugs help!

Good news / Bad news... The brown wire from the Regulator/Rectifier combo (5 wire type) does have to be connected to the battery or I get no charging voltage. Not that I truly understand but that answers that question. Good news is, I read correct A/C voltage now that I know how to properly test it (thank you guys). ALSO I read better DC voltage around 4000rpm - 13.9 volts. I'd call that pretty close to right. BUT the bad news is, I still have the high speed miss. I even had it missing during the two voltage tests. So back to square one on that...

My next test is to remove the tank and somehow temp feed fuel so I can rev to the 4000 range. I want to confirm I'm not arcing or grounding those fat yellow coils & 8.8 wires to the tank.

Nothing is ever as simple or obvious as I hoped it would be.....

Then your bike is wired incorrectly. Yes, the brown wire will eventually have a path to the battery, it is not intended to be the charging path. The brown wire is too small for this purpose.

From the reg/rec, there should be a heavier wire going to the starter solenoid where it connects to the positive battery cable. This is apparently missing on your bike.

With a 5 wire reg/rec combo, the brown wire is not used. It should be left unconnected, and prevented from shorting to ground.

I looked at that thread, and it confirms, with a 5-wire reg/rec, the brown is unused.

If you use the brown wire to charge the battery, the bike will possibly stay running (crapily) when the key is turned off. It starts to run crapily because the battery gets removed from the circuit with the key off, and so the power comes in pulses rather than smooth DC.

Just re-looked to figure this out and did a huge forehead slap. I need to clarify. From the R/R: 3 yellows one red & one black. 3 yellows connect to the pink, blue and yellow wires running to the green connector. The black goes to ground and the red connects (spliced) to the brown in the green connector. THAT's where the confusion started. All I could see was the brown friggin wire...

What I should have said was, when the red from the R/R ran to the brown of the green connector, it ran (like crap) with the key off. Cutting it loose and plugging it in with the white wire (double female connector) to positive, fixed the key off problem.

No doubt the red wire is the charging lead. I’ll be re-wiring that red removing that old brown wire and adding a section of new 12ga RED wire.

ooh. 12ga is kinda tough to work with. I usually use 14ga for the charging path (red positive and black to ground).

It certainly won't hurt to use 12ga, if you can deal with it.

Update / recap: When I started, the 4 of the 5 wires from the rectifier/regulator connected to the green connector (5th black wire to the batt neg). They had also installed the red (charging) wire to the brown wire going into that green connector. Apparently that is wrong. Turns out, that brown wire leads directly to the hot side of the tail light circuit. So effectively back-powering and charging the battery. Not to mention, that hook-up also allows the engine to run with the key off. The other BAD thing is my brown wire was BADLY overheated and even melted thru the insulation in several spots. Geez... How it didn't ground out, fry the R/R or start a fire is a stroke of luck. Replaced the entire brown wire including the white 6 wire connector in the headlight bucket (not hard, just a pain in the ass) and all is well AND the charging system is working correctly.

Test ride is next, if it still runs like crap at speed, I'll keep looking and likely start another post. Thanks for the input guys - it all helped.