clutch, belt drive alternator, ignition

With my thesis complete and a very light class load, I have been able to get back the things which matter in life.

Below is the completed belt drive clutch and alternator setup.
The clutch hub was scraping up against the inside of the primary chaincase retainer. It had an appointment with my grindstone, followed by a 1 mm thick CLUTCH spaaacer.... hahaha. Inside joke.

Its all on and works great. The commando diaphragm clutch is the stuff that dreams are made of. It is a "2 finger" clutch now. Routing the cable is going to be tricky as the bikes short frame lends itselft to kinking cables. The alternator is all new. This is great because switching the lights off everytime the rev's drop below 2K is annoying, especially in heavy traffic. The bike was even known to cut out in front a 100 of my closest friends in high school. Tara may remember this. Embarrassing to say the least.


This is the new Tri-Spark ignition setup all the way from Australia. It is electronic like the old Boyer setup, but it is a smaller self contained unit. The red wire is a ground wire, the other two go directly to the ignition coil. The old boyer system had a separate black box that was hidden under the saddle. This unit is all self contained. I am anxious to see how it works.



The little black alloy disk in the distributor below houses 2 tiny shiny magnets which make the sparks. I am not exactly sure how it works, but I think those tiny little magnets create a small current, which goes through the flux capacitor contained in the Tri-Spark unit. The current is then synchronized into the visible light spectrum when it goes through the dilithium crystal. From there it is sent to the ignition coil where a team of fairies, riding unicorns, magically transform it from ca. 12 volts to ca. 30, 000 volts. I am about 85% sure this is how it all works.

Distributor before installing the alloy black disk. Overall, the ignition setup was fairly easy. The later model Commando's have a built in timing degree disk inside the primary chaincase cover which makes ignition timing stupid easy. The Atlas has no such device, one must drive all over town looking for a 360 degree protractor, drill a hole in the middle of it, find TDC, tie a piece of wire to a cylinder barrel base nut, have the wire point at exactly 0 degree on the protractor, and then turn the engine back until you reach 32 degrees on the protractor. Hard, no, tedious, yes.

So sexy.

Hopefully battery box and oil tank happen this weekend.