'85 XJ700 starting issues

So last year I bought an XJ700 as my first "real" bike after getting my license. It was a little rough around the edges but that the bike was cheap and the reason why I bought it was so I could learn how to smooth out edges. The petcock was leaky and the carbs needed to be rejetted so that was the first order of business, but after that it ran pretty great...just in time to be put in storage for the winter. And it sat until this spring where I took it out as soon as the snow was gone, and it still ran great! I had no problems with it all spring and summer and took it on some fairly long day trips just to see how it would do.

However, the last week of August I started to run into some problems. I went out one day for a ride and found that the bike simply refused to start. The starter motor was having some difficulty engaging, but my dad was able to give it some light encouragement from a rubber mallet. With that ruled out, we checked to make sure that fuel was getting into the system, the plugs were sopping wet (so we had to dry out the cylinders...). With the cylinders dried out and the plugs swapped out, because why not, we turned it over again...nothing. Next we checked for spark, cylinder 1 and 4 were dark. From this we decided that coil was bad and I was able to confirm as much from a local shop, who helped me find a suitable replacement. I swapped out the coils and confirmed spark. Everything seemed good so I tried it out again, still nothing. This is when I went out and bought some ether, which I sprayed directly into the cylinders...equally nothing. Also during this time I tried popping the clutch to make sure that it wasn't a weak starter that was preventing it from starting. It seemed to turnover for a couple revs before it died that way...either way it still didn't stay running.

And so now I'm posting here, confused and somewhat frustrated by the whole thing. My thought on what the problem is has changed 5 times after each was presented as actually preventing the bike from starting. What is most puzzling to me was that the bike was starting fine before and now absolutely refuses to start after some seemingly minor adjustments and repairs.

I want to see if anyone here has some ideas on what I can check next or ridicule me for my shoddy troubleshooting process. Is there something obvious I have not checked yet?

Also where do you guys source your parts? My throttle cable recently snapped (unrelated to the current issue) so i need to replace that as well.

Thanks!

 

Ok first parts are at top of page at xj4ever he has almost every part and they will be the correct part to orde look at the catalog find p/n and start start a IM message to order. Please check your battery is it fully charged and how old is battery.

 

have you checked the battery voltage and the battery drop voltage when starter button is pushed?
first place to look

 

excellent thank you for that.

Battery has been on a charger most if not all of this time. Just checked the voltage, it was 12.7 just sitting and dropped to about eleven while cranking.