A little background. My 77 KZ650 had a leak on carb #2. The bowl and overflow tube were constantly wet. I removed all the bowls and found dirt in all of them that I cleaned out. It seemed to fix the leak, but now the bike has a rough spot around 4000 RPMs. I figured that the needles are now sealing properly, resulting in the fuel level in the carbs being a little lower, resulting in leaner running. OK. Not a big problem. It still runs decent. Then it started blowing the main fuse. After it blew the first one, it blew two more before I could get it out of the driveway. I tracked a short down to the regulator. After disassembling the regulator, I decided that it wasn't the problem, and that it was just providing a path to something else that was causing the short. I put it all back together and the short was gone. Great.
It went about 9 miles and then blew the main fuse again. This time the blown fuse and the fusebox showed signs of excessive heat at one contact. I then found that the clip on that end of the fuse was not clamping firmly onto the fuse. I then decided to go through the whole bike and recondition all the connections. This included Dremeling any contact I could, squeezing the ends of the connectors to increase contact pressure, and applying dielectric grease to all connectors. The bike ran worse than ever. Sounded like it was running on 2 or 3 cylinders. I tried to ride it to work, but I had to turn around after a couple of miles. I found that spark plug 3 was not getting spark. I also discovered that I never replaced the plugs during the initial restoration as I'd planned. The plugs were 10+ yrs old and rusty. OK, they need replacing. But that doesn't explain why cyl 3 picked this time to stop firing. If anything it should be getting better power, not worse. So I replaced the plugs, and now I have spark on all cylinders. It now runs on all cylinders, but the rough spot at 4000 RPMs is still there and it's worse than before. After it completely warms up, you can get it to rev past 5000, but not before. After it gets to 6000, it pulls great up to 8000 which is as far as I pushed it. Since it pulls great to 8000, this should mean that the ignition is getting plenty of power, and the carbs are getting plenty of fuel. Right?
So, do I have an electrical problem or a carb problem? Why did refurbishing the connectors cause cyl 3 to lose spark? Dielectric grease is not supposed to improve or degrage the integrity of a contact. It's supposed to prevent oxidation, which makes a good connection last longer. It shouldn't cause a cyl to lose spark. And why is the rough spot worse than before? This weekend I plan on replacing the fusebox with a blade type fuse block. It has 4 slots, and I plan on using the extra slot (in the future) for Wiredgeorge's coil repowering mod. One of the results of this mod is to improve ignition when the mixture is lean. If the above symptoms point to a particular problem, I'd like to fix that and not have the coil power mod cover it up.