MOPED ARMY

What is your headlight doing?

The 103 is wired as ext ignition ground, correct? Meaning, NC switches and brake light running off of ignition side ground. Some are gonna say you need that resistor thing by the back rack or one in your tail light, etc but:

1. you are getting ground from somewhere, since runs with levers pulled, light blown.

2. your brake light is wired into the wrong side of the coil

I just had a similar issue on a city bike, literally did the rev up/brake lever thing for 5 mins brake/throttle, On/off to try and blow it out, silly. Spent a day getting nowhere and gave up.

Another thing I should mention about this bike is that when I got it the wire harness was cut away midway so that only the three wires, yellow, white and black remained running to the tail light. All of the wires and switches forward were missing.

Lucky though I had a near complete savaged harness that I spliced the tree wires from the tailight then threaded the harness into position.

For a while now I have been building my stator plates using these old style condensers that I bought in bulk from Moped Larry a year or so ago. Always had good luck with them so far. Staring to wonder if I finally soldered in one that is possessed and that is the cause of my trouble.

The bike runs perfect ignition wise though Grrrrr!

Yes I get you pat. Actually three solder tabs. One for the HT plug wire Then the right hand tab solders on the brake light wire. Then the left hand tab solders on the were to condenser/points

Took apart the headlight and spun the bucket mounting bolts to make sure that the toothed washers were digging in to the metal to provide a good path to the bike frame. The two black ringed ground wires in there I cleaned as well. Give the motor a spin. Still the same fault.

So all is Zen now with this bikes electrics. I guess what I learned is that is no matter how long your in the moped game, if you get too comfortable, you can fall for the same old gremlins.

Seems like every time I repair annoying electric issues that voice comes booming back in my head, "IT'S THE GROUND, IT'S THE GROUND"

So now I am thinking, with the shaky ground at the tailight, when I cut the clean ground by squeezing the brake levers the ignition coil in search of another path to ground only finds a weak dirty path so all the energy from the coil going to the spark plug gets backed up in the brake light bulbs filament causing it to pulsate and burn twice as bright at the same time killing the spark at the plug?

If wish someone could put this into better words to relay what I am thinking

I KNOW THAT WAS THE MOST BAFFLING PART> WHY DID IT NOT DIE AFTER THE BULB BLEW TILL LIKE THE LAST FEET?

Well the blue wire was grounded to one of the bracket bolts. At some time someone had built another identical ground wire on the other bracket bolt. I actually just put a socket on the grounding wire I chose to use and wormed it back and forth to be sure that the bolt/wire was digging into the metal of the fender to create a clean grounding path. That cured the bottleneck of electrons that was wreaking havoc on the brake light bulb element and robbing the spark from the plug.

Yes good point PD. Doing rescue builds for resale though you try to cut your Labor. But then if you spend 4 hours swapping coils and stators I guess it's a wash.