To this day I still can’t get the LED Turn signals to blink. I did get them to work last summer, but they quickly reverted to their non-blinky state soon after. I have no earthly clue as to why, but it doesn’t worry me. The first place I suspected that could be the root of the problem is the switch. I figured I’d poke around in there and try to simplify the already overcomplicated antiquated switching mechanism. Take a look, it’s weird.

I don’t think I ever really looked inside even when I was installing the clubmans.

Filthy. I suspect Honda used some kind of dialectic grease on the sliding mechanism and all sorts of dirt and grime collected in there for 35 years.

It really is a mechanical wonder but could have been engineered with a much more simplistic design. The first thing I knew needed to go was the Orang/White and Light Blue/White wires. They belonged to the running lights on the original turn signals. It’s these wires I suspected might be causing my no-blinky malfunction. Let’s clip them and toss them for good.

After I took the whole switch apart I cleaned the grease off of everything, including the weird sliding switch mechanism.

Filthy.

These little sliding things come off too.

Shot of the rails.

The spring switch part was also covered in grease and grime. One more interesting aspect of this piece is that there is a ball bearing that’s used to either: 1.) Ground the switch, or 2.) Help slide the switch from left to right. Be very careful and don’t drop it and lose it.

The bottom housing, once again stuffed with some kind of lubricant or grease.

I cleaned every bit of it.

Here you can see the ball bearing back in the housing. It sits in a little triangle groove which has a slit that runs left and right. The other set of wires that I found odd in the switch were the Brown/White wires. The CB550 manual defines these as the tach and speedo bulb wires. Meaning that the lights in the speedo and tach are for some reason running into the turn signal switch which means they are also unnecessary in here. The Brown/White wires are set up to be actively fed power either in the middle, left or right switch mode. Totally unnecessary, we can feed those bulbs power from within the headlight bucket. Let’s de-solder them and get them out of here.

There, as it should be. All we need are the left and right turn signal wires and the pulsing gray wire coming from the relay.

I also went ahead and trimmed some more length off the wires in the headlight bucket.

As a rule of thumb if I take off a fastener that’s rusted or stripped I never put it back on so these bolts are going in the trash.

My local hardware store didn’t have the stainless steel fasteners in the 25mm length I need to replace the originals so I had to get black. These black allen head bolts will eventually rust. I coated them with a little WD40 before installing them.

So, all done and still I’m not getting any blinky-blinky. The lights just come on and stay on as they did before. I have successfully narrowed down the problem. It’s not the switch. Now I’ll have to look carefully at the ground wires in my bucket.

Good day gentlemen. See you next weekend.

A while ago I purchased a stainless steel allen head bolt kit to replace the crusty screws on my bike. I never actively set out to replace every bolt in one sitting, it made more sense to replace bolts as I removed them, if and when I removed them. Like many who work on these old Honda CBs, I came across a few stubborn screws that wouldn’t come out and eventually became stripped to the point where no impact driver could turn them, so last week I bought one of those broken bolt and damaged screw extractor bits.

Best money I ever spent.

I wish I had made a small movie illustrating the process, it was unbelievable how simple and fast it was to extract all my rusty stripped bolts. The Alden proGrabit is phenomenal.

I won’t go into details but the bit has two ends, one for drilling out the head and the other for gripping the hollowed hole and turning it out. Each stripped screw literally took 3 seconds to extract. Needless to say I was impressed and will never bother with an impact driver again with these old rusty screw heads.

These two on the left hand side cover were particularly crusty. They came out in 3 seconds flat.

The obligatory cafe racer stainless steel allen head shot…. you get the idea… looks real sharp. Now that I can remove the side covers maybe I’ll polish them up one of these days when I’m bored and I have some cash to buy a polishing wheel.

Before I begin writing about the process of static timing the Dyna, I will start with some words of warning. It seems that the wires on my particular Dyna were mislabeled.

As you can see in the photo above, the black wire has a yellow band around it indicating that you are supposed to put that black wire in the yellow receptacle in the bike’s wiring harness. The same goes for the white wire with the blue band around it. However, these colored bands were on the wrong wires. The white wire should have the yellow band and the black wire the blue band. Does that make sense? I noticed the mistake when I was testing the spark on my number three cylinder. When I manually turned the rotor and landed on the “F” mark on points 1-4 my number 3 cylinder spark plug fired. This was remedied when I swapped the black and white wires from the Dyna to my wiring harness. Whatever…. it was an easy fix. No worries. Now onto the timing.

My little DIY static timing light worked perfectly. I’ll try to describe the process as best as I can and hopefully better than what is written on the SOHC forums.

My little light was made with two wires. I connected the positive wire to the white bullet connector of the Dyna that was connected to the main wiring harness. The ground wire of the light was connected the the frame of the bike. I chose the the metal from the clutch cable holder. With the three main screws holding the Dyna slightly loosened I grabbed a wrench and slowly turned the crank until the light was illuminated. Then I noted at what point the light turned on.

On normal points you want the light to come on when the “F” is aligned with the notch on the engine case. The Dyna, however, wants us to align the notch to the advanced timing marks which are the two little lines to the right of the 1•4. So the idea is, with the three main screws loosened, you are able to turn the whole Dyna rotor to compensate if your notch does not line up correctly. I not only had to turn the whole Dyna as far counterclockwise as possible I also had to reposition the individual pickups.

Each pickup has two tiny black allen head bolts on either side, loosening these tiny bolts allows for a few degrees of adjustment. I had to rotate these as far counterclockwise as possible to get the correct timing. One thing I should mention… the tiny bolts aren’t metric. Luckily the Dyna-S comes with an allen wrench, but it would have been nice if I could turn those bolts with my allen wrench kit, instead of having this tiny tool to keep track of in my toolbox.

They say the Dyna is great for cold starts, and most likely will start on the first kick every time. After the timing was statically done (induction timing to be done later) I kicked the bike and it rumbled to life for a second. On the second kick it was on for good. Impressive, considering the bike hadn’t been started in three weeks. The Dyna produces a truly hot thick spark, I’m very happy with it. Goodbye points…

Last week I removed the points plate from the advance assembly but didn’t unhook it from the wiring harness. The procedure is fairly easy and a matter of simply pulling the blue and yellow wires from the harness.

Here is a pic of my old points plate removed from the wiring harness. It’s still works and I’m going to keep it just in case things don’t work out with the Dyna-S.

Since I was down there pulling wire, I decided to replace the right side engine case bolts that held the points plate wire in place. The bolts were frozen and pretty chewed up but the metal tabs that held the wire in place were still good.

Brand spankin new Dyna-S.

After removing the spark advance assembly, I had to remove the points cam by twisting to the the right and pulling.

Next, I had to slip on the black magnet cylinder thingy. In order for it to sit perfectly in the advance assembly the spring mechanisms must be pulled out so the black magnet cylinder slides down and engages with the notches

I lined up the number “1″ with points 1-4 on the advance assembly.

Slide the Dyna rotor over it and bolt down with some shiny new stainless steel allen head bolts.

  

Then I slid out the rubber grommet from the old points wire.

Split it with a razor blade.

Placed it on the Dyna-S cable and in the slot in the engine case.

Ran the the cable through new stainless steel allen bolts.

White wire goes into the blue, black goes into the yellow. The red wire is spliced into the 12v brake light wire. I’ll post more pics of the splicing next weekend. The next post will cover static timing the Dyna.

Allen bolt kit for the CB550. Over 85 pieces in this bolt kit. It isn’t just a bag of bolts either, it comes with a set of instructions for bolt placement. I un-seized two of the original screws on the right side cover before my impact driver froze up. I think its beyond repair. I’ll try to get my money back on the driver or see if i can exchange it.