Fixing Stuff On a Rainy Day

Saturday January 16, 2023 Guerneville CA.

Rainy day

It was raining most of the day so it was a good day to try and fix a few things.

New battery

The new battery for one of my quad runners arrived in the mail yesterday. I bought a Gel filled one this time as they  seem to last longer and need no maintenance, except for keeping the connectors clean. I got the right size and it dropped right in.

Chainsaw no start

I was pretty sure the on/off switch was faulty as the lever was mostly messed up, so I took stuff apart to check it out. You can see the wire has broken off with part of the switch on it.

I decided I’d have to get a new switch next time I’m out shopping.

Quad runner won’t shut off

This quad runner has had a problem of not shutting the engine off when I shut the key off. It also idles too low which has been ok as that’s how I shut it off for some time now, but it’s been a pain restarting it all the time when it dies from the idle being too low.

I got the manual out and studied how things were wired and figured out that one of the wires that goes to the CDI unit must be broken or something. Since most of the wires had connection sockets in the front headlight I took it apart, but the connector I needed from the CDI unit wasn’t in there.

I looked around and found the CDI unit at the rear of the machine.

And followed the right colored wire up to this place where they made some connections for the CDI unit. The CDI unit is what fires the spark plug.

I found the right wire and it had a connector on it but that didn’t have the other male connector wire thing on it.  They were supposed to be attached and I, at first, couldn’t find the other connector, but finally found it stuffed underneath all the other stuff like someone had stuffed it under there. I hooked up the two wires and gave the engine a try and it stopped now. Great.

Idle adjustment

Now I could adjust the carburetor for a higher idle. The screw to adjust the idle was a bit stuck, so I removed it and lubed it and adjusted the idle up a bit. Things should work better now.

Brake squeal

I took the back brake off the other day to fix this problem and thought it was fixed but I found the squeal was still there when I rode it. Looking more closely, I found the brake pedal was sticking on a little and needed some oil to lube it up. I oiled it and worked it back and forth until it worked right. Another fix done.

Weather guys were wrong

I thought the rain would let up in the afternoon for a few hours and if I could use the chainsaw, I go up into the hills and cut that big tree off the road, but rain just turned to drizzles so that was out.

Back to the chainsaw

But that got me to thinking about how to shut the chainsaw off without a new switch. I hooked this wire to the switch wire so I could just press it to the saw case to short it out to ground so the saw would shut down. I started the saw and tried that and it worked

Fixing the broken switch

Then I looked at the switch to see what condition it was in. It was cracked. I held the crack together with my fingers and tested the switch out with my meter and it worked. A little epoxy should fix that crack.

Here’s another shot of that broken switch.

I clamped the crack closed with these parallel pliers and held them shut with my vise and applied a bit of epoxy to the cracked switch and set it to dry. This should work so I won’t need that wire to shut it off.

Sometimes rain can make for a productive day and things will work better with those things fixed up.

Nice day.