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Upgraded xs400 to Electronic Ignition


kmac
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Hey kmac,

Thought i'd post a video here to help other peeps and myself as well...

Probably my last question...

I actually got to reading my first wiring diagram (wanted to learn before i attempted putting wiring in) ...

So on the 81 harness i cut the black ground wire off (comes out of the Tci igniter unit),

and also cut off the end of a red/white wire coming out of the front/kill switch...

Also noticed i had another wire i needed to cut, so cut the end of a red/white wire coming from the safety relay(question about this later).

Noticed the wires still 'tangled' together so I couldnt remove everything yet off the harness...

Whats left over is kinda is tangled between the wires and I was wondering how to remove that brass clip from the harness so i can pull out whatever is just crimped there ...

4855272021_a0ea9c33d9_z.jpg

UPDATE: Well I did remove it by cutting into it by hitting it it with a flat-head screwdriver/pic and a hammer. maybe theres a better way/tool to do it for next time if anyone has suggestion, seems like im going to have to buy one of those brass things to splice everything back in that area ... but heres my main question ...

So that red/white wire area i just broke up had 1 wire that comes from TCI ignitor unit,

another comes from a coil and

another comes from the other coil,

1 comes from 'safety relay' i see in the 81 diagram,

and another goes to the engine-stop(kill) switch.

Here is a video everything very detailed:

So in summary, I'll probably splice the ground to where the little black wires goto on my current 78xs400E harness (black wires meet up into 1 wire and touch the left side of battery box so i assume its ground).

I'll splice in the 2 red/white coil wires and tci red/white wire back onto the main kill switch wire like it was before, and have that main wire spliced into the front red/white wire on 78 harness... You can see in the video that after the green tape, there is a red/white wire also going to the back from the coil wire. Should I splice that back red/white wire onto that kill-switch area too? ... Unlike the 81 harness which had a red/white wire going to the 'safety relay' (dunno what that is btw)... I think that back red/white wire on my bike goes maybe to the Starter Solenoid if Im reading xs400E diagram correctly. So does that get spliced in as well into that merged area? ... if so, then it'll look like it did before where it looks like 5 wires are meeting up there (only difference is it would goto the starter solenoid instead of safety relay).

Anyway, hope the video helps peeps answer my question and to upgrade their machine too in future.

EDIT: got it working i think, will post another video with final result.

Will report back Sunday night if she runs :).

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Here is my second kick with electronic ignition !!!

No wires melted haha...

Electric start also worked well. It seemed to really quickly turn engine with the electric start compared to my old engine (although i should note, the spark was really bright with the kick compared start to electric start.

Carbs:

Think I may need to tune the carbs a bit. My carbs were tuned for the previous 78 engine and not 81. It spluttered a bit as I gave it throttle.

Smoke:

I did see smoke after a few minutes ... I shut bike off and quickly rolled bike inside garage with more light and quickly took my tank off to see if wires were melting lol ... Didnt see the smoke so i was kinda stumped ...

Turned it on again and saw it kinda come off right at tip of header pipes before they turn down... This may just be kinks from a 7 month engine sitting? electrical tape on the exhaust flanges (i had trouble putting on my 2-1 exhaust as the flanges kept slipping off the sides so i put a small peice of tape to hold the flanges together on the pipe while i pushed it in, etc?)

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sounds like the carbs need balancing.

one pot is dragging the other, you sound well chuffed getting it going :)

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sounds like the carbs need balancing.

one pot is dragging the other, you sound well chuffed getting it going :)

Hey drewp,

The smoke looked to be the electrical tape burning off ... I used tweezers to pull it off the flanges and it stopped smokin g(i had tape on their in first place cause it took 30m trying to put exhaust on myself and the flanges kept slipping off, so i got pissed and decided to just use small tape to hold them together on the headers while sliding them in and accidentally left them on).

I used a Colortune today on the carbs just to get the mixture right, and got the bike works perfectly! I dunno what i would do without a Colortune.

The electronic ignition is running great! it took a few weeks confirming the wiring... 1.5 months total as i wanted to take off the old 78 engine/carbs and go through my manual learning about basics.

I wanna thank kmac for helping me out so much! I'm basically following his work, and I just decided i want to put Dyna coils on there, and who is the first match on google for dyna ignition coils xs400: yamahaclub thread by kmac... so DC3-2 coils have 3ohm resistance like electronic ignition has so he tried it and it works. Thats the next project :). ... [ and maybe adding new mufflers and paint the tank :) ]

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Good job! Everything takes longer than you think it will. But getting there is half the fun isn't it? Glad to see colortune plug works well, been thinking about getting one.

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Good job! Everything takes longer than you think it will. But getting there is half the fun isn't it? Glad to see colortune plug works well, been thinking about getting one.

Yes it works very well. i tried reading spark plugs but never got it as good as close as with the Colortune.

Also it helped confirm my friends Honda CB450 problem last week. His bike was having hard time to start (20 kicks!) and even then cut off often before we could even ride it... Apparently cyclinder wasn't getting any gas. and we wouldnt have known with our basic skills as he had a 2-1 exhaust so we couldnt feel exhaust pressure. We were testing spark before by grounding against engine and were stumped as it had good spark... also spark plug may have been fouled once with gas on it so we thought it was getting gas good ... colortune revealed spark but no ignition .... and we look at the right carb and found it had white chalky (old gas?). so the float needle was sticking 95% of the time (except that one time we saw gas) and not getting any gas to cylinder. I guess we could have also just felt the header and see if it was warm.

Im cleaning carbs for him now, so hopefully that'll run soon too and buddies can ride together :)

PS oh yeh when i got it started in the video, my dad heard and came in pretty excited to congratulate me.

He's been busting my chops for months that I'm no mechanic and can't do it, and should to just my main profession lol.

He thought it was gonna blow up on me haha. Gave me more motivation ;).

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  • 7 months later...

Is it possible to post here a simple colored wiring-diagram of the ignition swab? I ordered the pickup and cdi and also found some matching coils in Germany (they were intruduced at the XS400SG and were also used on the dohc models. I figure that they are high output models?).

How did it work out? Better handling/gas respons? Stable setup?

Thanx!

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