I'm looking for some help on diagnosing a problem with the ignition. This is a 12 volt DC style ignition. It quit running a few weeks ago and I have researched some of the posts on this website and checked these items:

1 12 volts to the CDI with key on and no power with key off.
2 4 wire CDI
3 No voltage from trigger wire while cranking motor. Ohm'd this wire with ground to the trigger bolts and it is reading 7 ohms, far from the 140 that it is supposed to be. This is a new stator. Old stator was reading 30 ohms.
4 All ground wires from all components, ignition switch, CDI, coil, etc are 0 ohms.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

I'm wondering if you have a short somewhere. What kind of quad is this? On some quads the trigger wire is paralleled with a kill switch. When the kill switch is on the trigger wire is shorted to ground.

Disconnect the trigger wire right at the stator and measure the voltage coming out of the stator while cranking the engine. What do you measure? Also measure the resistance to ground (engine stopped) at the same place. What do you measure?

By disconnecting the wiring harness from the stator that separates problems in the stator from problems in the wiring harness.

 

The trigger wire is parallel with the kill switch, the tests I performed were taken at the stator harness prior to being connected into the kill switch harness. I've tested the same numbers after they are plugged together. The gap between the flywheel and the trigger is not adjustable but could it be possible that they are too far apart or a bad flywheel?

 

Check and make sure that you have the right batry for you gocart. also check an see if you have your batry cables on the right side. It mite not be gettin enouf juice. The only other thing it could be would be that it could have a bad cam shaft. Hope this helps.

 

KartMaster01,

Thanks for your advice, I'll check that out ASAP.

 

you had 30 ohms on your old stator, and 7 ohms on the new stator. That's a huge difference. So at least one of those stators has got to be defective. I've never seen any pickup coil read that low on any chinese quad. I'm wondering if you have replaced a bad stator with another bad stator

The gap between the pickup and the flywheel raised bump will only affect the output voltage of the pickup coil. This is important, of course, but it will not affect the resistance reading of the pickup coil.

Just to double check, did you have your meter on a really low AC voltage scale when measuring the trigger voltage? Something like 20 volts full scale? You're looking for something like 0.2 to 0.5 volts AC so you need to crank up the meter to its most sensitive scale. If you really read 0.00 volts on a low AC scale then you pickup coil is bad.

Another reality check: Measure the AC voltage to the ignition coil while cranking the engine. If the trigger pickup coil is triggering the CDI you should see a lot of zero readings with random voltage spikes interspersed (as the meter captures a spark firing event). If you see nothing but really low voltages while cranking then that is another indication that the CDI may not be getting triggered (the other causes fro no CDI output being no power to the CDI, no ground to the CDI, and defective CDI).