Gauge Harness.. or how to learn to love electrics

So rather than accept an invitation from 20-something-yr-old girls to go dancing and partying downtown tonight, I decided to stay home and dismantle some of the KZ's electrics. They called me an "old fart" to which I replied, "I'm done with older women like you".

:lol:

Anyways the symptoms have been:
- blowing gauge lighting bulbs fairly rapidly
- high beam light doesn't work
- new horn only makes a "cluck" at <4000rpm

I started by trying to figure out why the horn brown-wire circuit only had ~10.5V on it. Turns out if I hit the kill switch this goes up to ~12.5V (battery is a week old). So the 5ohms in the coil circuit is drawing a lot of current out of the battery, but seems like <3Amps shouldn't pull the battery down that much?

I'm not liking this "Kettering" Ignition design, it seems to waste some 30-60W of energy through coils when not firing. Does Dyna use this too?

I'm going to take more voltage drop and current draw readings in the morning on this. What is a typical battery voltage with the bike not running but ignition and kill switch in run on a fully charged battery?


Next I went and rebuilt the lighting harness as you can see below. I carefully removed the pins from the 9-pin connector (just press the catches down from the front and slide them out), to find them all corroded and the connector housing partly broken, causing bad contacts - I need a new connector housing.

Hopefully I can source that 9-pin housing somewhere locally, anyone got any tips?

I also found the P.O. accidentlly cut a wire and damaged insulation. He had decided that stripping the cut wire and twisting the ends together would be enough. This poor connection was probably blowing those gauge bulbs, so I soldered it nicely and cleaned out a lot of corrosion everywhere, conductive greasing everything. Please, if you guys do electrics, don't cut corners.

Can't wait to get back in the sunshine. Thanks for reading, this is the only place where people might understand why I stayed home (I hope?)...

i never party so i always stay at home (i need that party money for my z):side:

i would of had the 20 year old girls cleaning parts for me!:evil: :whistle:

Just the parts wireman:evil: :whistle:

inline79 wrote:

I'm not liking this "Kettering" Ignition design, it seems to waste some 30-60W of energy through coils when not firing. Does Dyna use this too?

The Dyna is worse. It basically doubles what the points do. By that I mean the dwell is almost double that of the points. Also, when the engine is not turning, the Dyna usually has both coils at full current (when the ignition is on).

The stock Kaw electronic ignition is far more conservative. It's dwell is only about a third of the Dyna's, and both coils are off if the engine is not turning, but it is still technically a Kettering, albeit transistorized.

If you want to convert to electronic ignition using the points as a trigger, I devised a pretty cheap solution. It will shut off the coils automatically after 5 seconds.

www.geocities.com/loudgpz/GPZheiModForPoints.html

You could also try a Mallory Hyfire CDI module. It should work fine on your 4 cylinder That module does not supply power to the coils unless it gets a trigger event from the points, or magnetic crank trigger of the stock electronic ignition. It is a little larger than necessary, but you might find room for it on your bike. Just don't buy from Century Performance Center, go to a local automotive outlet.

I like the idea of using the stock kawasaki electronic ignition. If I can do that without wrecking anything original, I'll go for it.

There used to be an article on putting the GPZ550 ignition on the KZ650 but I can't find it anywhere.

The only real issue is that it's possible to be 180 degrees out of phase on the crank.

The 550 is set up as follows:
As you look at the pickup area (on the right side of the engine), the pickup on the left (toward the rear of the bike) should have the blue wire and black wire, which go to the ignitor. It controls the ignition coil on the right side of the bike which fires cylinders 1 and 4. That ignition coil will have a black wire to it from the ignitor.

As you look at the pickup area (on the right side of the engine), the pickup on the right (toward the front of the bike) should have the yellow wire and red wire, which go to the ignitor. It controls the ignition coil on the left side of the bike which fires cylinders 2 and 3. That ignition coil will have a green wire to it from the ignitor.

The advancer rotor can also be 180 out, so it needs to be checked. It should have the point pointing toward the "TEC 1016" marking on the advancer.

You can copy that setup.

The stock 650 coils will work, but 3-ohm Accel or Dynas will be more reliable and may produce better spark. You could also use the 550 coils which are 2.5-ohm coils, but 25 year old coils fail sooner than later.