No spark on a KZ1300

Kawboy wrote: At 2.6 ohms you should be fine. If you were at 2.4 ohms like most AW82 coils, I'd say add.4 ohms resistance.
Adding resistance lowers the load on the igniter. The guide line is to maintain the primary resistance above 2.7 ohms. Thee are a few guys running 2.4 ohms without resistors and doing fine we here.
My 2 cents

KB

Copy that, will I be safer adding a 0.4 ohms resistor? rather be safe then sorry, hard to come by these IC ignitors.
RL

If I remember correctly total should be 2.7 - 3.5 Ohm. Lots of strong opinions floating around this sub just, but I will just tell you what I did.

Resistance fluctuates with temperature - it tends to increase. If I remember correctly, my coils showed around 2.3. Or was it even 2.4? Doesn't really matter. I added 0.4 resistors just because I couldn't source 0.5, which is what I really wanted. It keeps all within the safe range by the manual. People put 2.4 coils without resistors and have no problems - great! You definitely can not use Kawasaki stock which usually show 1.6 - 1.7. Anyway, doing the math, 0.4 + 2.4 = 2.8. Withing range. I chose to go this route.

So what happened? Bike runs like a charm in cold and hot temperatures. Worked like a charm in a torrential rain - I had to stop as it was literally impossible to ride. Just an hour ago I started it in only +3 C and it was instant. On December 31, just a couple days ago, I had a great last ride of the year!

I also think you should be fine with 2.6 ohm coils without the ballast resistor. I fitted 2.2 ohm coils with 0.4 ohm ballasts and it all works great. My old coils also went the same way as yours with big cracks which I originally filled with epoxy. I found that the cracked coils generally worked OK until they got warm but produced a particularly poor spark on hot restart - compounded by additional heat soak from the engine and the lower voltage when the starter motor was turning. The new set up I have works like a dream!
Happy restarts!

ronlander wrote:

Kawboy wrote: At 2.6 ohms you should be fine. If you were at 2.4 ohms like most AW82 coils, I'd say add.4 ohms resistance.
Adding resistance lowers the load on the igniter. The guide line is to maintain the primary resistance above 2.7 ohms. Thee are a few guys running 2.4 ohms without resistors and doing fine we here.
My 2 cents

KB

Copy that, will I be safer adding a 0.4 ohms resistor? rather be safe then sorry, hard to come by these IC ignitors.
RL[/quote
It certainly wouldn't hurt. Just understand that the spark will be weaker under certain circumstances. You're just .1 ohms under the minimum standard spec that Kawasaki has quoted. Kawasaki would have set a conservative number here and what are the chances that your OHM meter is off by a tiny margin enough that your ohm meter has rounded off to a whole number?
I would be happy with the 2.6 as measured. And to contradict my self, I too have a set of 2.6 ohm coils to go in and chose to add the .4 ohm ballast resistors I found from a Mercedes Benz. That was based on info that one of our older members "trikebldr" had posted. He had an engineering background and started a post talking about this whole AW82 conversion and he was adamant that the system absolutely needed to maintain the ballast resistor. I wished that our members hadn't pissed him off with their know it all attitude and challenging his info with blabber. Trikebldr left the site and I miss his input greatly. He had a wealth of information and I had great respect for what he offered this site.

The post was Houston, we have no Ignition I wished I could have talked him in to staying on this site and finishing this educational post but as I stated, he left because of a lack of appreciation. he spent hours writing his posts for us.
Anyway, if you're truly interested in this kind of information, have a read of this post.

A very interesting post, this guy knows his stuff to say the least..

That said, I think I'll add three 0.4ohms resistors, just for the hell of it (and to reduce the returned current back to the IC Igniter). want to make sure my KZ1300 is happy, she is indeed a high maintenance girl.

I finally finished this upgrade/mod, I ordered the Bosch ballast 0.4 Ohms resistors (three of them), coupled with the Honda (TEC AW82TRI) 2.6 Ohms, made a mount for the ballast resistors so that it looks somewhat like the stock mount, repurposed all the wires, I wanted to keep the stock look as much as possible, reconnected everything and tested it. Bike starts up right a way and works much better then it did with the stock coils. Total cost for this mod was about $110, (coils, resistors, connectors)