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…
