Ask The Editors: Coil Performance When Grounded

The coil isn’t a terribly complicated piece of equipment but it as important one.

This is a bit of a tough question as we’re not exactly sure what situation you’re describing. If, as we suspect, your coil stops outputting whenever you hook up to the component’s ground terminal (but works fine otherwise), we would guess that you’ve got an internal contact that is allowing the charge to short circuit rather than flow around its bindings as intended.

The function of the coil is fairly simple – it takes the voltage coming off the quad’s battery and steps it up before sending it to the spark plug for the purpose of combustion with the air / fuel mixture. It accomplishes this by routing the electricity around tight “coils”. Like any electrical component, time and repeated use can wear down internal insulation/ expose the conductors such that electricity can take a shortcut to ground.

If we’re reading you wrong and the coil is shorting out always, this is certainly what’s going on and the unit will have to be replaced. If, on the other hand, it works normally but hooking it up to ground causes it to suddenly stop working, you likely have an internal short confined to within the housing until you complete the ground circuit – which then allows it to short circuit.

Either way, it sounds like you’re about due for a replacement. If you’re handy with a multimeter, testing the coil isn’t very difficult (we’ll include a video below to guide you through the process) but based on your wording, we suspect it’s going to be time to replace that coil soon.

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