Yeah, ONE of the prettiest...
Yeah. I admit it. I'm bored, I hate March and I'm just trying to start trouble
OK, I'll bite. Weak batteries could be a cause of the woes, though if my original Electra's battery was poor (which didn't take long, Indian Exide), it simply wouldn't budge the starter motor, though I could still kick-start it. Eventually swapping to a Motobatt AGM made it work again. Until...
We can throw in backfiring on start-up due to poorly set-up aftermarket carbs or the oops-no-spark-delay early TCI boxes (E/S iron barrels with points ignition never had to worry about THAT one if they kept it stock) and bounce-back on stopping the engine (for those of us who ditched the cracked AVL tappet cover) as contributing factors.
As a related matter of interest, there were cases of Norton Commando owners with the E/S Mark 3 models who swapped from points ignition to the Boyer Mk3 analog electronic ignition and lunched their sprag clutches in a manner we'd all recognize, the sudden extra load on the system when the starter button was pressed would cause a brief voltage drop, enough to send the Boyer TCI into full advance. Boyer claimed to have fixed this with their Mk4.
I wonder if the actual sprag clutch is fine in other applications, but it was introduced on the AVL 500s without thinking through the implications of the TCI ignition. RE should have persevered with
CDI ignition like they had on the AVL 350 kick start models.
A.