Magneto failure

[Dave Strome]

Greets!

Had a magneto fail after only about 200 miles... wasn't sure if it was the CDI or magneto so I bought both. I read in another thread where someone said something to the effect of "in my experience, this situation is almost always the magneto, not the CDI".

Are these magneto's just prone to failure? Should I keep a spare handy? Seems odd that something with no moving parts would just fail at random. Didn't bother trying to diagnose the problem, not worth my time for $10 bucks. But it looked fine. All the wires were attached.

I was just tooling along, it seemed like it got weak for a mile or two, then died. I had just come from finding an excellent new fishing hole and I was hurrying home to get my truck & boat!

Fortunately, I wasn't too far from home and had my wife come pick me up. I was still able to get an hour in fishing before it got dark.

Any comments? Appreciate any insight!

DS

 

[2door]

Did you catch anything?

The most common problem documented here is a broken wire/solder joint at the magneto coil. A good ohm meter will tell you if the mag is the problem.
Tom

 

[Dave Strome]

I couldn't see anything wrong with it, all the solder joints looked fine. No broken wires, nothing looked "burned" or anything like that. In fact, I'd say it looked almost brand new - holding it up next to the new one and I could not tell the difference.

But, I did catch fish.. turned out to be a Bass heaven and I've been back several times since! I have a retractable pole that I bring with me on my bike so I have something handy when I find a nice little spot. When I started getting hits immediately after throwing it in off shore, I had to run home for the boat!

Thanks for the info!

DS