Featured Potential New Triumph Owner

i have time because im between jobs and just fixing cars and roofing over the chicken coop. and your machine is really nice.

dont be discouraged. when you buy one of these the first thing everybody has to do is figure out years of other people 's weird modifications. once you get it sorted youll be in good shape.

you clearly have a short circuit. somewhere bare metal is touching other bare metal. maybe inside that coil.

one brute force test procedure is to mark and unplug all the suspect wires and components, downstream from the last good spot, like the battery negative terminal.. turn on the key and plug them back in, one at a time, in order. when the fuse finally blows, youve found the bad component.

if theres more than one, just keep going.

your parallel wired points work fine, but i would have to think about how to time the ignition. i dont know of any advantage to doing it that way. may the PO just had the coil lying around.

 

im going to suggest something else, too. while points work great, you will have to adjust and replace them periodically. and the mechanical spark advance unit behind them gets worn out and russty.

you can replace all of that with a boyer electronic ignition.

https://vintagetriumphsupply.com/index.php/triumph-boyer-electronic-ignition-micro-power-bsa.html

^^^this is the expensive kit, but it includes the coil as well. the EI is easy to install, you set it one time and never look at it again. ive got two or three and one haz been ticking along for over 30 years with no maintenance.

 

listen, youre there.

unhook both wires from the coil.

turn on the key. if that fuse blows, the coil is fine, and the problem is somewhere upstream towards the ignition switch and battery. something is shorting out, but not the coil, because its disconnected. HOWEVER--i am guessin gthat that is NOT the problem, because you got a melted wire between battery and coil when you jumped it. so the proble is most likely between that input coil terminal and everything else.

anyway, if the fuse doesnt blow, the wires from the battery to the key switch and then to the coil are good. take the single input wire from the ignition switch and plug it back into the coil. not the output wire leading to the points! if the fuse blows, your coil is trash. you know this because nothing else is hooked up.

if the fuse does not blow, the problem is downstream from the coil, towards the points. leave the coil hooked up and plug in the output wire going to the points-- with the points and condensors disconnected. then plug in one condenser. then both. then one set of points. then both. when the fuse finally blows, thats the bad part.

the rectifier and zener are part of your charging system. your alternator generates AC, and the rectifier converts it to DC to run the bike. the zener is just a voltage regulator. if you run the motor faster, the alternator tries to charge up to 16 volts or so. the zener takes any voltage over 13.5 and converts it into heat so you dont boil your battery. that finned egg on the forks is just a heat sink with the zener inside it. it is possible that your problem is a zener shorted to ground or a wire from th erectifier shorted to ground, but not as likely as a bad coil. and they are easy to test.

ADDED:

^^^this works when the fuse is on the hot side of th ebattery. i forgot that in this machine its on the return side. so this procedure will cause confusion. oops

 

excellent. the coil was a cheapie that he put in because it worked . . . until it got hot for the first time. you could probabkl fit any dual tower coil s from most any japanese motorcycle-- Does This Cheap Ass Solution Look Familiar?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Motorcycle-Ignition-Coil-For-Honda-CB-200-350-400-450-500-550-650-750-900-1100/322117126906?fits=Make:Honda&hash=item4affad4afa:g:cBcAAOSwnNBXY7Ig

i seriously recommend the boyer. all the boyer takes to run that isn't in the kit is a hot wire from the ignition switch. that's it. simple, easy, and maintenance-free, forever.

there are other electronic ignition setups, but the boyer is robust and simple. ernie sells a more basic version of his ignition that uses the stock coils, but they are not the ideal resistance. since you have to buy a coil anyway, his expensive kit would end up at about the same price. but if money is more important right now, you can get this going with a duplicate of what you had, at the price of trying to maintain an interesting but weird system that nobody has ever seen before, in the future.

 

I know its a spend on your part but a Boyer and Podtrnonics reg-rec or similar is fit n forget.

 

i have a 1966 BSA thunderbolt with a pointsplate, cam, and AAU that that was just flat worn-out. i cursedit for days trrying to make it work correctly. finally i just said FU. i had an expensive pazon smart fire electronic ignition system waiting for something else that i put on, because it was there.

now i have a worn-out $2500 motorcycle with a spectacular fool-proof $500 ignition system that never goes bad. i wish i could complain, but my beater BSA always starts and always works, while my hot-shot stuff waits for me to fix things..

.

 

Lol, I only started using Boyer on our bikes 6/7 years ago. I was quite happy wasting time/money sorting out faulty/worn points ignition but finding original NOS parts became near impossible back then in the UK and already being aware of rubbish pattern parts is what converted us to Boyer.

 

it's a bitsa as well. saw it for sale at a farm supply store. it's a 1966 with a 1972 motor, but keeping all the 66 covers.



th etank sprung a leak so i swapped on th etank from my 69 for a while. screaming top end is 70 mph, maybe, but with the electronic ignition its a one-kick machine.

goes anywhere, just not fast.

you'll like th emicro. it's more sophisticated than you need, but having the little mini-coil that is designed for th eignition is a big plus. easy to mount because its so small.

 

the modern points aren't as good as the original lucas. back when the japanse points were first being introduced i had so much point bounce wit them that the strobe timing light would give me two images to select from when i tuned the motor.

 

Great looking BSA On a good note i have collected a small box of nice used points related parts over the last few years since fitting EI kits that if i need any parts for a customer that refuses to go EI i have original parts i can use now.

 

i have an old victor that wouldn't run on EI-- it was a boyer, and i could not get the unit to advance/retard. so i had to run it at full advance, and it would seriously hurt me trying to kickstart it. i finally put points back into it.

i run a magneto on my race bike, because it is so simple. but it suffers from points bounce as well.

 

Out of interest have you thought of running a Boyer or similar back to back with the mag.

 

to compare them? not yet. but you have a good point. i should test the EI.

i know theres horsepower to be found in the EI, though. the magneto is a 50 year old ARD, a flat track piece from the 1960s. theres significant spark scatter at any rpm, which is just the nature of the beast. plus it takes some amount of horsepower to turn it.

but its foolproof and completely eliminates the elctrical system. plus, i confess i like to hold speed records using obsolete components that are faster than the high tech improvements my competitors are using.