Leave the advance in and if the Dyna takes a dump you throw a points plate in and be on your merry way in a 1/2 hour or so with the dual fire system.

 

Well, it took a while to get the new Dyna S kit, complete with new 5 ohm coil, but I got it installed yesterday. It fired right up and I got the timing reset. Rode about 30 miles or so and no cutting out, no backfires (kinda miss that a little!), no flipping the ignition switch off and back on (don't miss that at all!).

I also put in new plugs and realized that the iridium plugs DO have a very narrow, almost pointed center electrode - so that was all just a mistake on my part.

I had to put in new wires since the old coil and the new one were made differently, so, now I've got some cool 8.8's on there. Runs very strong, and noticeably peppier. It kicked off cold with one kick last night - never had that happen before!

So, it looks like the old Dyna S WAS the culprit, and WAS kicking in and out - probably due to that wire rub which, I suppose eventually caused it to burn out completely.

A note on hooking up the simple dual fire setup: the coil is not marked positive and negative because it doesn't matter. I had to call Dynatek support line to make sure since the papers say if you hook it up wrong it will fry the module immediately. They said that so long as the hot is on the same side of the coil as the white wire, and the blue is on the other side of the coil, which is which doesn't matter. They also said the this system will happily run any type of plug wires with no problem. So, there ya go.

I do have an issue that I've sent them a question about, and it is this: I'm not sure I got it hooked up exactly right (I'm not electrical at all) because now my tach is not working, and the kill switch on the handlebars is not working. I did not pay close enough attention to the way the old coil was wired. I had two loose wires: one is+12v whenever the ignition switch is on, the other is +12v whenever the kill switch is in the run position. Since I saw +12v on BOTH of these (I guess the kill switch was on "run" when I tested them) I put them BOTH on the same side of the coil with the white wire. I'm wondering if the one that is live with the kill switch should be on the other side of the coil - but I'm not about to fry my brand new module.

Any electrical experts out there that can help me with that?

 

the 12 volts on all the time with the ignition switch you need to find whats up with that - did someone add it if so Y// IS THE BAR SWITCH INTERMITTENT if so you will go backwards again with this - you cancel out the bar switch when you add another 12 volts to the coil and it sounds like your doing just that

 

Yeah John, that makes perfect sense. I'm not sure what the "live with ignition" wire is doing down there. I understand I should have a pink wire that runs from the neg side of the coil to the tach...not sure what happened with this, but I may have some issues in wiring under the gauges. I got new breakers to put in there, so I'll pull the gauges off tomorrow and see what I can see. There could have been some wiring weirdness under there all along, that led to some of these other problems. I guess I'm just glad I didn't have a fire or get stranded somewhere! I've probably only ridden the bike 500 miles or so since I got it.

 

picture up what you see

 

Well, ya gotta love a happy ending! It turns out it was a VERY good thing that I had lost track of the way the old coil was wired, so I had to check both wires to see which one was hot. They BOTH were, which, as John noted, couldn't be right. On closer inspection, I saw that the wire that was live with the ignition switch on WAS the pink wire that goes to the tach from the negative side of the coil. (33 years of grime kept me from seeing it's color). So, I'm no electrician, but even Ray Charles could see that the wiring diagram showed the pink wire running directly to the tach, with no other intersections. So, what the @#$!!

I pulled the gauges off and here's what I found:







Before: notice the red insulator up against the tach connection - shorted out sending 12v to the neg side of the coil....BAD NEWS.

So, here's the after pic:





Moving the orange wires away removed the short, and fixed the problem.


Now the tach works, the kill switch on the handlebars works and, best of all, I didn't fry my new ignition module in the process! It's safe to assume that this short caused all the problems I had been having, and eventually killed my old Dyna S module. Not their fault, by any means! I'm just glad that they, and this site offer the support needed to successfully keep our old classics running without everything costing an "HD".

 

I never had any luck with those twist-tite wire connectors on a Harley!

 

solder is your friend for life -- sit at a table an with the correct stuff in front of you in a 1/2 hour you will have mastered a real thing when needed

soldering iron

thin solder

shrink tubing

wire stripping pliers -

take two wires stripped. and slide one inside the other rig up 2 clips to hold both at the same time and have at it - slide shrink tubing over the weld and heat

 

better to twist them together first, so you have both a mechanical joint and the solder. remember to slide the heat shrink tubing over the wire and down one side before you solder.

 

twisting is ok it just makes a bigger bump in the connection