Ikea 1984 XJ1100... some assembly required

I'm happy enough with JB weld, it's feels very solid. I'd like to do better but this will do for now.

 

I've been out of town for work but I've been doing some shopping. I have a set of coils on the way from XJ4Ever, I decided to get the entire coil, wire, plug cap kit to make life a little easier. They should be here in the next couple of weeks.
Since I had nothing else to do I took a look at the leaking forks. When I drained them the oil came out clear, so there was something done to them. Once I got them off the bike and on the bench I found my answer for the question why are these leaking? If you want to diagnose it yourself look at the pictures now.

Ok, did you spot the problem? yup the seals are installed upside-down, oops. They were rebuild but not correctly. Anyway I bought a new set of fork seals from All balls racing (hmm I wonder if a couple of 20 year old boys came up with that one?) kinda cool looking with a garter spring on both sides. after a quick cleaning I installed the new seals but only partly assembled the forks.

I measured the springs and sure enough one is out of spec, too short. I decided to look into my options before ripping apart the parts bike. With a bit of Google-fu I found that the Progressive Suspension fork spring kit 11-1110 works for my beast but sadly it's no longer offered. But thanks to clean living or just plain good luck there was a set on eBay! I just got them today and sure enough the beast is listed as the right bike for these things. I just need to make some spacers, from poking around the forum and reading the instruction sheet I see that heavy PVC or metal pipe will do the trick so I'll hit the hardware store tomorrow.

In a final bit of "Progress" I took the front wheel to the local bike shop to get the leaking front tire bead fixed. They did their thing but it's still going flat, ugh. I'll be visiting them again tomorrow as well.

 

Very clean operation you have going there, look good. Very little pitting on those forks and not too much rust in the pics from the top of the fork seals. I have done some that need to soak in blaster just to get the clip to move. Bike looks great and the wet set pics were nice. Keep doing a great job of cataloging all that good work.

 

So I ended up buying some galvanized pipe to make my spacers, it was the cheapest option by about $20. So with a bit of hacksaw work and filing, then a cleanup I had a pair of spacers to the Progressive susp. spec 3.5". With those in hand and ready to go I filled the forks with oil then used my genuine, Yamaha OEM, direct from factory fork oil checking tool to confirm the levels were correct. With that done the forks were assembled and installed. Only a couple of pics as my hands were busy.

 

The next step was installing the new coils. I got them on the bike and to my complete lack of surprise, no start. I checked the coils and wires, all good. Then I worked down the rest of the list. Pickups - good, kickstand switch - good, tip over switch - good. so we're left with the ugly final step. Replace the TCI. This makes the rather large assumption there is in fact a good TCI available. So I tried the unit from the parts bike and no dice, still no start. A quick google led me to eBay where there are few used, untested TCI's for about $80 and a couple New Old Stock ones for $415 !!!!!!

Since I've got nothing to lose and two bad units I though what the hell, let's take a poke a fixing one of these things. A long time ago when I was a dealer tech at Acura I made a fair bit of money repairing Daytime Running Lights relays. So I'm going state the fatal phase that condemns me to unending frustration.

How hard can it be?

With a bit of hacksaw work I sacrificed the case of the spare unit to the hacksaw gods and exposed the guts, I've got a lot of bit's and pieces to test and hopefully there will be an obvious problem. Don't be fooled by the clean looking back of the board, it was gooped up pretty good, this is a post cleaning pic. I've read over the repair threads on doing this and I'm going to take a crack at a repair.

 

The last 2 weeks have been educational, I decided to make this a systematic process. Identify, test, replace (if needed). with that in mind I began by de-soldering at least 1 side of all of the components to test and identify each one. This took a while but I have a good setup and all the time in the world with the riding season pretty much finished for the year. I kept track of what's what and how it tested on a spreadsheet and some paper. All of the capacitors actually tested OK, which really supervised me. I broke 2 diodes and since I planned on replacing all the capacitors anyway the diodes got added to the order. I had to bodge a couple of traces from general butchery but everything tested OK in the end. I connected the "repaired test TCI" to the bike and got no spark at all, oh bother.

I then gave the "production" TCI the same treatment, plus replaced the transistors as well for good measure, all with less collateral damage. Same result, no spark. This did not make me happy.

I don't have the ability to test the IC's (Integrated Circuits) or the daughter board that is apparently the data storage and contains the spark maps.

So today I tested the wiring going into the TCI and got reasonable readings from everything with a questionable amount of resistance on the power wire, I'll repeat with a fully charged battery later.

I think my next logical move is to test on a known good XJ1100.

If anyone here rides an XJ1100 and is willing to participate in the learning process message me and I'll ship you a TCI to try on a working bike.

I'm really hoping there's an electrical gremlin somewhere other than the TCI but it's starting to look like I have 2 bad units. I have desperation plan B, (or am I on plan C by now?) but I'd like to confirm the status of my TCI's first.

 

You didn't mention side stand relay, it has a set of normally closed contacts that disable the TCI as part of the ignition cutoff safety feature.

For troubleshooting no spark you can just remove the side stand relay and defeat the ignition cutoff safety feature. And, not real familiar with the XJ1100, but it appears to have an emergency stop switch that does the same thing as the side stand relay and applies a ground on the B/W wire on the TCI. It may be best just to remove that B/W wire from the TCI 8 pin connector and test for spark.

 

Hi Rooster53,

I followed up on your suggestion and I have spark! Thank you!! I won't call it amazing spark but it's there. Both of the repaired TCI's are functional.

I don't have a running bike but it's trying, I suspect I need to look at the Carbs again, they were incredibly grubby.

 

I pulled the carbs off again, and this time decided to really be sure they're clean. I picked up the Gunk brand, dip bucket of carb cleaner/solvent. I disassembled the carbs again one at a time and they each got a 12+ hours bath in the solvent. After that it was time for a rinse in hot water, then into the ultrasonic cleaner in warm soapy water for another bath. After a final rise and drying I chased all the orifices with welding tip cleaner set. I confirmed I could see light through all the holes and it all looked clean and there was no sign of any varnish or dirt inside or out. I then carefully re-assembled the carb with fresh o-rings and a new bowl gasket.

After repeating the process 3 more time I joined them all together, I checked the fuel level height for all the bowls and only had to tweak 2 just a little, then I was satisfied they were in spec. The next step was set the idle mixture screws to 2.5 turns out and then using some 3/64 drill bits in the butterfly valves I set the balance screws so all the carbs felt like they had the same drag when pulling on the drill bits. With that done I think I have the butterfly valves all opening pretty close to in sync. At this point I was finished everything I could do on the bench.

I re installed the carbs and after a long and sincere prayer to the carburetor gods I pushed the button.

Va-room.



I'll call that a success, I moved the bike outside and ran it for about 5 minutes, I didn't see any leaks and it seems pretty stable at idle. It has one hell of a tick but I can live with that, clearance is an air-cooled bike's friend right? The vacuum gauges are not in sync and I need to balance them but I've called it a day. I haven't tried to balance carbs in about 20 years so I've got some reading to do.

I've been at this for 8 months, off and on and it finally feels like I have a bike. I still have a list of things to do.

1) Balance the carbs. it looks like I'm going to average around 10"HG I need to figure out where that should be.
2) I need to hunt down the gremlin in the wires for the kickstand and tip over safety switches.
3) The starter is reluctant to work when hot, I need to run that down.
4) Install and test the headlight.
5) Set the fork pressures.
6) The 3 new things that I'll find while working on this list.

I finally feel like I'll be riding this bike next spring, I'm going to have a celebration drink and relax for the rest of the afternoon.