Electric Starter

Here's a new one to me.

I have had all of the usual problems with electric starter engagement, last time I fixed it was a year or two ago and up until now it has worked almost perfectly. Today I was out for a ride and after a stop the starter went for working very well to almost never engaging, had to kick start it to ride home.

So on the ride home I'm thinking, what could cause it to suddenly stop working like that. the first thing that comes to mind is a broken wishbone spring, anybody ever had anything like this happen?

No time to pull the cover off today but hopefully tomorrow...

Check this out, when I took it apart the wishbone spring was off of the gear, couldn't go anywhere but loose. I got the gear out and found that the return spring was completely wrapped around the groove where the wishbone spring goes. So it looks like when I went to start the engine, the engine kicked back (does that sometimes when hot), the return spring was over compressed and got under the wishbone spring and popped it off!

The worn rubber damper on the gear was partly to blame because the return spring gets compressed to the point of coil bind. Now I'm staring at it trying to think of a way to prevent this from happening again.

Hmmmm....very odd.

Well that’s the first time I’ve ever heard of that happening. Hmmm......could just be a fluke? Seeing as you just replaced all this 1-2 years ago, if the parts don’t look damaged, I’d be tempted to just squeeze that wishbone tight onto that gear and reuse it.

You can run with no return spring, but 5t sez the bendex will jangle now and then idling on the side stand..

gggGary said:

You can run with no return spring, but 5t sez the bendex will jangle now and then idling on the side stand..

Click to expand...

Yes - but you'll certainly need to untangle it from its present position wrapped around the gear...

I had intended to put that spring back in eventually, but after seeing this maybe not?

I have 3 gears varying from decent (the one in the bike now) to very worn and the inner rubber damper is shot on all of them, again I think that a kick back and coil bind precipitated this. Without the damper at full thickness the return spring itself acts as the inner stop... not good.

So I put the good gear in the lathe and trimmed the very pitted rubber to smooth it out. Then I took an old con rod copper washer which was a pretty close to the original thickness of the rubber and made a shim to replace the rubber thinking that the remaining rubber and copper combined would provide some damping. I then JB welded the copper washer to the bendix so it won't move, would have rather had it on the gear but was not confident I could get it to stay put. So I end up with about the original spacing for the return spring when the gear is all the way in and the coils of the return spring just meet each other.

Cool - but are you sure you want the potential of loose pieces of JB Weld floating around INSIDE the engine/transmission assembly?

Don't think it's going anywhere, there is a lot of surface area and I spent some time prepping it.
At any rate, is that any worse that the rubber and metal bits that come from the starter normally?