Friday, September 9, 2011

That's it! You're grounded!


Still trying to sort out the GL1000's problems, I decided to take a break from the head scratching and do something productive.

The condensers are normally grounded to the battery box. This is a poor place to ground them because of their distance from the breaker points plate, especially when you consider how prone that battery area is to rusting due to gasses vented by the battery. The Ideal place to mount them would be on the points plate itself but there's no room in there so we must improvise a better solution.

So I busted out some spare 8 AWG wire, some shrink wrap, and a couple of ring terminals and got to work.

The result:

Wire attached to the condenser ground.
Notice the rust on the battery basket where it's mounted.
Wire barely peeking out from behind engine mount where it's grounded.
Altogether pretty clean install.

I figured it would still be good practice to properly ground the condensers, despite the fact that I plan on running a Dyna-S in the near future. Who knows, maybe my electronic ignition could fail and I would have to throw my spare points plate on in order to make it home. It would be a shame to burn through a set of points just for that.

Symptoms of poorly grounded condensers include:
  • Exploded, prematurely worn, or damaged points
  • Poor idle
  • Hard starting
  • High rev missfire

2 comments:

  1. Like this maybe:

    http://www.randakks.com/TechTip50.htm

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    Replies
    1. That's perfect. Yes, exactly like that.

      NGW informed me that the GL1000 has a bad ground so it makes perfect sense that Randakk would have already tackled that.

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