Just the prose and delivery is amazing.

Press on lad.

cliff

There are no trials and tribulations in Yama-Land. Just problems, solutions hiccups and explosions. Everybody have fun tonight!

a

The local car engine reconditioner phoned up to say the rebore was finished. Picked it up at lunchtime removed the razor sharp edges around the ports and subjected it to various cleaning processess at work to rid it of ingrained contaminants.

Got home and in my excitement, forgot my aching body and fitted the piston and rings.
Usually after a day of struggling with huge parts of heavy equipment engines, axles and transmissions I am totally spent and only fit for laying on the sofa watching TV.
Getting way too old for the job.

Anyways, in a rare burst of evening energy, I continued on and got the barrel, head and exhaust installed.

Once again my reputation for good fortune held to its normal way of doing things. The local car reconditioners machine shop who have quite a good reputation has trashed my cylinder. In the pic you can see a shadow where the hone missed just above the exhaust, something the camera picked up, it was not visible by eye.
That rebore would just about manage 200 miles before it would be sounding like a brick in a concrete mixer.


A rare burst of energy saw the head and exhaust fitted.


I spied the toolbox lid and was curious to see if the original tools were still in there.
Happily I open the lid and looked inside.

They were not......  All it contained was a very nasty shock.

Do you think it was a borderline call to go to the next oversize.
If piston was supplied i guess they thought its so close that you may as well get the use out of the piston kit.
What piston clearance does it have now.
If Yamaha give a maximum like 1.5 to 1.8 thou & its at 1.5 now then do you think another wipe or 3 with the hone might clean it up still in usable spec. I don't know--just dreaming.

Its the same cylinder as the two stroke paranoia thread. RT. The one bored barrel shaped round the ports and now with the new liner?

So I am peering into the toolbox and wondering just what I am looking at. I expected a blue bag containing white and rust coloured spanners.

What was in there was an electronic unit of some unfamiliar type, but what on earth was it?

Was it a tracking device he had fitted in case the bike was stolen?

I pulled at it and out it popped. So did the electrical plugs connected to it.  They popped out like a babies jack in the box toy. I was not expecting such a state of affairs and dropped the unit onto the floor.

Closer inspection revealed that the plugs were not designed to fit the sockets and therefore had no means of latching them together.
What the feckity feck am I looking at???

Closer inspection yet,  revealed bent pins just slightly bent in order to fit in the plug registers. The plugs being oriented 90 degrees from the way the sockets were designed to accept the original plugs to make them closer to fitting the pins.

The only means of holding the plugs tightly into the sockets was the fact that the plugs had been placed into the sockets and the unit jammed into the tight confines of the toolbox. Jeeze.

As I was scratching my head at this rather unexpected predicament, a chill grabbed my heart.
Oh please God. Oh Goddy God, please do not let this be the wrong CDI and original wiring harness he has butchered to make it fit.
Yep, you know how my luck runs now. I pulled the wiring harness out.
It was indeed the wrong CDI and of course, the comprehensively butchered wiring loom.

Why? Why on an original bike with just 6 months use and less than 2000 miles on the clock.
Of course it would be to do with the dimwits obsession with 12v electrics.

I do not have enough facepalm emojies to do justice to my feelings.
My immediate feeling was to jump in the car, drive 300 miles, ring his doorbell and punch the silly old sod in the face.

It was time to slink away from the mess and have another beer while being very attentive to the missus with a view to ensure her glass was always topped up. 
Later that saturday night I was going to have to inform her that there was going to be several new assaults on her credit card.

Dimwitted butchery. All insulation tape, twisted together wires, crimp on lucar terminals and wires of random sizes and colours.


I had two choices. Make up an entirely new main harness, or try to find a good secondhand one. New ones were unavailable and the rest of the harness that I had been desperately trying not to see was in a similar state.

Hack and chop feckwittery at it finest.
 

And here we have the days haul of good cheer. A chinese CDI unit of unknown provenance, a cheap, generic chinese 12v reg rec and a non automotive rated battery with slip on terminals held in place with gaffer tape.  Not a fuse in sight.


​​​​​​

Rexs speedshop and electrex sell plug in 12v conversions.  Change the bulbs, battery and horn and there you go.  No hacked up main harness. 
But that was too expensive a route for the mouth breathing, oxygen thief of a "restorer" and he decided it would be a good idea to go it alone.

I found a NOS, 7 wire genuine CDI advertised in the US.  The seller was willing to ship to the UK, so snapped it up.  If I had failed to locate one, I would have had to fall back on a Rex or Electrex  aftermarket  unit. 
It would have been less expensive, but my goal was to restore the bike to as it was in late August 1978 when it left the factory as far as practicably possible.

I also found a secondhand main harness in the US from a running bike.   I would have preferred a new one, but beggars can't be choosers. 
From the extensive reading I had done, I knew that there were differences between the US and UK harnesses, the first being that the tailight ran off the battery in the US and was always on.  The UK one ran in concert with the headlamp.

The second was that the UK version somehow supercharged the battery when the lights were on.  I forget just how it did it, it was switched through the lighting switch, but do remember I had to replicate it by making up a secondary harness and piggy backing it onto the main one to feed the rear light and battery as per the UK spec.
Not ideal.  Wish I could have found a good, untouched UK loom.  Still have not seen one.

The regulator was completely unobtainable.  The only genuine ones offered up for sale were badly rusted blobs at over inflated prices.  I eventually gave up on finding a good original and bought a new 6v one intended for an Italjet scooter.

The missing rectifier was easy to source.  No problem there.

That just left the battery.  Back in the mists of time, I used to be a fan of replacing old batteries with motobatt bateries, so found a 6v motobatt agm battery and bought that.
Even I thought that a conventional flooded cell battery was taking originality too far in this day and age.

 This was the first time I had violent thoughts towards the seller.  Previously I saw him as a complete useless tosspot who was blissfully ignorant of his lack of skill and knowledge. 
Now I see him as a demon, sent to aggravate and torture me.

There would be many other occasions of aggravation to come, including a later email threatening him with court action for gross misrepresentation in his advertisement after the final straw.  From his ad, I fully expected to fill the bike with fuel and oil and ride off into the sunset for many years to come.

AAAAARGH GNERRR!  Patience my Ass.  I Want to Kill Somebody.  Site of much consternation and cause of much beer consumption.



 

New Shift lever and stopper screw arrived and was fitted. I now have a reliable gearchange. Yey!

The cheap fix spring I was bleating about earlier is the small one in the jaws of the shift lever.
You all know by now that fate looked at the situation, looked at me and weighed up which route to take?  The cheap and easy route or the more stringent one?  Fate made its decision...and I lost a bit more of my sanity and bank account.

I can now button the right hand side up and fill the transmission with 750ccs of motorcycle engine oil.

At least a little progress is being made.



But my optimism and happy moment was to be short lived.  Another of the old sods ticking time bombs was about to blow up in my face.

Back to work tomorrow, so the pace of the thread will be much slower. It has progressed far faster than I envisaged.
Still a lot of gnashing of teeth and wailing yet to come though.

So, I continued to look through the wiring and noted that he had also "been into" the stator harness. It was wrapped in insulation tape.  Actually I noticed far, far earlier but was trying my best to ignore it.

Again why? It was an essentially new bike when it was stored. What was that noise?
Could have sworn I heard the faint sound of demonic laughter. Must have been the wind...

Got out the multimeter to check the coil resistances and only got a reading from a single terminal. Oh God, this is going to be expensive. If he has damaged the coils...

I unwrapped the insulation tape from the wires....

And found this... Again why????  I needed to check the stator coils and make up a new stator harness.  I ordered the wire in the correct sizes and colours, and hoped with every fibre of my being that those expensive coils were undamaged.

Tinkicker, I think most of us can relate to buying from photos and when the bike arrives the grim reality sets in, however I have been unlucky in the past but not as unlucky as this 1.
I am loving this thread, not for the issues and bodges you have found (which can help others with the fixes) but the tension it gives and the unfolding story of " what happens next or what will I find next" and the way you write is awesome in telling this story.
1 thing is though when you have finished this bike it will be superb and fault free. keep it coming please.