Big Bloo and the starting problem

I was finally able to get someone out to the house to take a look at Big Bloo. It was a mobile/travelling mechanic that I got in touch with on the V4Musclebike forums. Charlene came out Sunday afternoon and after some get to you know chatter, we started in on the troubleshooting. Pretty quickly she determined that the starter was in fact the problem. I was doubtful at first since the symptoms were VERY atypical of a failed starter. I got none of the clicking, none of the usual sounds of a failed or failing starter prior to it failing. It just stopped working. And a couple of times with it not working, it would suddenly work once shifted to neutral. So to say I was not convinced would be an understatement.

However, the true professional that Charlene was, she tried the usual tricks like shorting between the solenoid posts to force the starter to fire if the solenoid is bad. This did nothing proving that even though power was getting to the solenoid, and it was passing that power on to the starter, the starter was still refusing to work. It took a bit to get the starter off, but once off we did the tried and true connect that bitch straight to the battery... nothing. Not even a spark. Somehow the starter had broken in an open connection state such that it wasn't even making noises.

After a quick trip to the parts store... where they tried to give us the wrong starter... Charlene started putting the new starter back in. She also discovered that a cross bar/linkage/strut connecting the engine to the transmission was missing a bolt. Since it was a critical support brace, I wasn't too worried, but after tightening it up so that the disconnected end didn't move on it's own, the rattling noise I have had since the transmission was rebuilt seems to have gone away or at least lessened a bit. I have started looking into replacing that bolt.

But enough of the side track.. back to the story.

Once everything was reattached, Bloo fired right up. No hesitation or bad noises. We went over the connection once more to make sure everything was fine and smiled at a job well done. Charlene earned every penny and then some. Once the work was done, she showed me how to test compression on the bike as well, and showed me that it looked like I had good compression at least on most cylinders. This was a good feeling, since that was one of the things I had yet to get to. She left and I started on the carb rebuild process... see Project BAMSFH™ - Part 5 for details there.

So far so good, Bloo is running good and actually I think that the started was causing drag on the engine as I noticed a slight drop in gas mileage prior to the starter failing and already I am seeing better mileage.