FM Bike Works

The CX500, minus just about everything!

As you can see, the engine is removed! Over the summer I noticed the stator got worse and worse until I nearly ended up stranded with a dead battery. So the first step is to remove the tank, side panels, foot break, carburetors, electrical etc. etc.

I was pretty pleased to see that the electric fan modification I did on the radiator is holding up well. The paint is holding up pretty good as well, although some has been scratched off around where the radiator inlet pipe is.

The other thing was pretty happy about was the condition of the M.A.C. exhaust system and how well the titanium wrap job is holding up.

Got the engine up on the bench this morning and popped the rear cover off. Man theres a lot of bolts on this thing. While removing the cover was mindful not the disturb any of the seals for the final shaft, shifter, or oil and mechanical seal on the water pump shaft. That said, I’ll need to order a new shifter seal, as well as new copper washer for the water pump (If I can’t find one) and possibly two new o-rings for the cylinder jacket what pass through pipes

As you can see, the starter gear is in great shape. This reduction gear on the engine is also in nearly new condition, which is really nice to see on a bike this old!

Both gears on the starter reduction gear on in nearly perfect condition.

The gear selector and selector star are both in great shape. This is an interesting design for a selector star, usually you don’t see them with pins to provide the indexing. That said, I guess such a system would probably last a whole lot longer.

The other thing I noticed (which is hard to see). Return spring on the selector shaft came (the shaft which protrudes through the rear of the engine) appears warn, so I’ll order a new one of those, hopefully it tightens up the gear selector a bit.

Checking on the timing chain things look good. You can see, given the position of the cam chain tensioner that the chain will need to be replaced in the next 10K miles, so another job for another time. There is still some room on the tensioner (though not much) and there is zero slop on the chain.

The final shaft, with damper assembly is in great shape. The lobes on the damper cam show very light ware, the shift is nice and tight and I expect many more years out of this.

The offending unit. Here’s the old G47 stator and pulser assembly. The first thing that failed on this stator was the source coil (which you can see by it self on the stator assembly). These G47 style stators are extremely complicated with a bit of a mess of wiring.

The new stator will be a G8 style unit from a newer bike. Normally you can’t run these in the old CX500’s with CDI control systems, however I’ve replaced the control system with a much better Ignitech black box.

You can see that the oil seal has seen better days so I’ll replace that while I’ve got the rear engine cover open.

After some quick work with the air tools and some wire cutters,  I was able to extract the old G47 stator core from the rear cover.

Next task is to figure out how much of this wiring bundle I can do away with. I suspect given that the Ignitech only needs pulser data, I will be able to get rid of quit a few of these wires.  This will be nice as it reduces the overall clutter, it also takes the weigh down a few onces 😉