You take the high road and I'll take the low road

[WD Forte]

True, I use Tesco domestic grade ( 10% paraffin) for the clubcard points
but scooty runs well enough on it if a bit smoky.
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bikers smell of wee

[WD Forte]

Final report:
He left Whitehaven to ride south to Hereford today and got as far Ludlow 24 miles from Hereford when the bike broke down !!
He'd already called and was awaiting Recovery to take him to his folks when we spoke.
He was getting error 33 'ignition coil'
This may be the coil failing or bad contacts or the weather getting in but it's a job for another day and not a serious one.
At least it didn't happen much further away.

He'll leave it in the garage at his folks until it's fixed.
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bikers smell of wee

[slowasyoulike]

[WD Forte]

Getting the weather in was my first thought too but on reflection
I wonder if the prolonged riding for hours on end over the last week or so has heated and cooked the coil primary windings.
It may be on its original 13 year old coil for all I know.
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bikers smell of wee

[MCN]

It will make a great movie.

(The bit at the end where he's cussing the hoowur for shitin'-itsel on the back-straight.)
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Disclaimer: The comments above may be predicted text and not necessarily the opinion of MCN.

[stinkwheel]

Bet he want to do his test now.
____________________
“Rule one: Always stick around for one more drink. That's when things happen. That's when you find out everything you want to know.”
I did the 2010 Round Britain Rally on my 350 Bullet. 89 landmarks, 3 months, 9,500 miles.

[WD Forte]

He wants to get it dropped off to me to fix.
He reckons its a better option for him than getting trains to Hereford and back and finding a local shop to test and fix it.
He's getting quotes from Shiply/Anyvan type places to
get someone to pick it up and drop it off.

I'll be glad in as much as I'll be to satisfy my curiosity and will be able to examine it to find out why it packed in.
He's not one for accurate descriptions of symptoms
but it sounds like after it broke down, it would start but cut out shortly after.
This with the error code 33 suggests a failing primary coil is a possibility, but an iffy connection would do that too.

My guess is all the ECU can do is measure the voltage in from the primary coil and decide if it 'likes it' or not and throw up an error if it's out of bounds.

BTW the recovery took 4 and a half hours to turn up, the bastards!
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bikers smell of wee

[Bhud]

That's the problem with bikes in general. If you ride them, you break them. There would have been no way to detect a failing coil.

[stinkwheel]

Probably just needs a good scoosh of WD fortye.
____________________
“Rule one: Always stick around for one more drink. That's when things happen. That's when you find out everything you want to know.”
I did the 2010 Round Britain Rally on my 350 Bullet. 89 landmarks, 3 months, 9,500 miles.

[WD Forte]

By the by
Its been here with me now since the 30th of September
and the fecker wouldn't start initially then it fired up and ran fine
No dtc's, nuffin.
I removed the coil and did some static resistance tests but didn't do much
else last week as I was up norf visiting until late Sunday
and he's only just order a new coil.
The coil checked out well within spec on the secondary windings
and plug cap, but about 50% over spec on primary windings.

Hyenas says the primary windings should be 2.2-2.6 ohms at 20C
and this one read just over 3 ohms. and this was with me allowing
for the 0.3 ohm resistance of the leads.

I did warm it a wee bit using a hot air gun and this increased resistance slightly and briefly considered building a rig to stress test
it but couldn't be arsed and told him to buy a new one.

All the connections looked clean and tight and I wondered about the switching transistor in the ECU breaking down under heat stress
but that's me probably/hopefully over thinking it and the new coil will get it back to a reliable runnng condition again.

I do have an OBD break out box and may try to quiz the ECU out of curiosity just to see if I can.
Had it been a Honda I could have done that easily.
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bikers smell of wee

[blurredman]

I've had coils resistence check fine both warm and cold but still be defective.
____________________
CBT: 12/06/10, Theory: 22/09/10, Module 1: 09/11/10, Module 2: 19/01/11
Past: 1991 Honda CG125BR-J, 1992 (1980) Honda XL125S, 1996 Kawasaki GPZ500S.
Current: 1973 MZ ES250/2 - 17k. , 1979 Suzuki TS185ER - 9k, 1981 Honda CX500B - 91k, 1987 MZ ETZ250 (295cc) - 38k, 1989 MZ ETZ251 - 49k

[BusterGonads]

I enjoyed the reports on this journey. Thanks. Reminds me of that bloke Stevens who rode his penny farthing from Sanfransisco to the American east coast, across Europe, Turkey, Iran, and India to China in the nineteenth century. He was similarly equipped as far as bivy bags and such, but he did carry a Smith and Wesson which he needed to brandish at villains more than once. The most striking thing in reading the account was that for the most part, the Great Plains were without roads almost entirely in 1884 and much of the rest of the USA had barely metalled tracks.

https://www.bicycle-and-bikes.com/history-of-bicycles/tomas-stevens-penny-farthing/

As a lad, between 1969 and 1973, I rode various small motor bikes - various villiers two strokes, a C15 and an A10 sidecar outfit up and down between London and Newcastle, every six weeks.The journeys seemed pretty epic at the time, though not as epic is this lad's. On the James Cadet it was a ten hour ordeal, crawling along with the trucks on the inside lane.It was pretty grim in January, I remember. I used to put newspapers under my jumpers and sometimes plastic bags on my feet.
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2016 Triumph Street Twin; 2000 Honda CG125; 1997 Honda Nighthawk CB250