The Next Nerobro's HowTo: Doing the Stator Dance

[SqDancerLynn1]

Looks Very good!!! Are you going to leave it bare or coat it with epoxie ???

[Captk]

Great work, hope this thread gets pinned somewhere as a permanent tutorial or reference guide.

[Nerobro]

The stator works. Pictures tonight.

[Nerobro]

I didn't catch a picture of doing the Wye connection. So here's the first leg getting soldered onto the wiring harness.

Each wire needed to be sanded to take the varnish off. This isn't an easy task to do properly. I recommend not using 320 grit. After doing some research, I was told that it's easier if you burn the end of the wire first, as that weakens the varnish. I was not so smart.

All three leads attached. These were really just extension wires as the last 6" of lead on the stock harness was quite brittle from heat. As in trying to bend the wire to strip it and the plastic coating cracked off.

If you look at the voltmeter, which is set to the 200ohm setting, you will see it's reading 1.1ohms. All three legs had the same value. That means I did it at least "even" if not "right." I used thicker wire, so instead of the 1.6ohms I get 1.1. That should be ok. You can see the shrinkwrap. I actually have one of the test leads wedged in the unshrunk tube at the bottom of the picture. the yellow wire that's in the foreground has the black test lead going into it.

[Nerobro]

Yes, I don't work in a terribly clean environment. The "brown" wire that's soldered to the pretty multi colored leads were bright yellow at some point in their life.

I took strips of electrical tape and added a second layer of insulation on each lead, then I strapped them together. The stock harness had a high temp fabric in that spot, but it's almost unusable now. You can see it laying top right in the picture. If you can't identify it... don't worry, it's really that nasty.

That, looks a lot like one of those pictures up top doesn't it? Almost stock! Except heavier duty.

The patient. A 1983 GSX550ES. This particular machine has been through three r/r's and this will be it's second stator. Well I thought it's second stator. More on that shortly. From this picture until the bike was running again, only 40 minutes elapsed.

[Nerobro]

There go the sidecovers, the tank, and suddenly the bike doesn't look so stately anymore. Poor GS. Beneath the cable tires on the center tubes, you can see the junction where the stator makes it's connection to the wiring harness. Honestly I don't like the setup much. 20amps go up some fine wires to those connections, then down the wiring harness, and under the battery, and up behind the battery, to the r/r. I'm going to be moving the r/r to somwhere it'll get airflow.. soon.

Skreemer, working on getting into the stator cover. He'd already gotten the starter cover off. The bike is leaning on the doorjam. By leaning the bike over you can gain access without having to drain the oil. I put the bike in first before I leaned it over so it is being held in place.

Can you guess where the stator wires go?

Can you guess now? The big thing on the end of the crankshaft is the rotor. The "misplaced" gear is the reduction gear for the starter. The shaft it normally rides on is still stuck in the stator cover. This is where we discovered that this bike has had it's stator replaced before.

[Nerobro]

The stock fasteners for the stator are Phillips head screws. Those, are not, Phillips head. The retaining clip is also an allen head, and that too is supposed to be a Phillips head screw. So along with being on at least it's third r/r, this will be at least it's third stator. Speaking of which, you can really see the damage on that stator. I blame it's condition on a failed gsxr r/r that I installed on the bike. There are certain r/r failures that are very hard to bench test, and I obviously missed a shot SCR. I'll be doing an autopsy on it later.

Though you can't read the numbers on that DVM, it's reading 90 volts. Which is certainly acceptable. At least it's better than the 45 I was getting before. That means I succeeded.


We put an hours worth of riding on the bike today. The solder joints are holding, and the battery is charging to 13.3 volts. Which is acceptable.

Yet another home spun fix. That appears successful.

[cberkeley]

Excellent ....way to go!

[Boondocks]

Very nice work competently performed, Nerobro.

This info and pictures will be very useful for those that want to rewind their own stators. This would make a very good addition to the stator papers.

[80gs1000e]

Yup, I did this all at my desk at work. On the clock...

......

[HammerHead]

An Awesome feat.
Definitely a tread that we will all be comming back to time and time again. Thanks to individuals like yourself, this forum ROCKS!!!

[skreemer]

as a little end to the tale we ran the bike around for a bit in a parking lot... Everything worked like a charm.

We also took our new roommate out to the parking lot and gave him his first taste of motorcycle riding with some clutch exercises.

[maclariz]

Just wondering. Did you use any coating / epoxy or not? How is the stator holding up after some use? Just about to embark on rewiring my GS400 stator.

[Nerobro]

It's still working great. :-) The bike charges like it should. I didn't coat it with epoxy, as epoxy will just insulate the windings. I did however wind them very tightly to minimize any movement.

[mf70]

Nice set of photos. This will make the project much more approachable for many.

Three thoughts:

1) The rewind shop that helped me said that baked varnish over the winds stopped vibration-chafe failures on the wire.


2) Over the crimped, not soldered joints, I used fiberglass insulation spaghetti stripped from high-temp wire, available at a hardware store. It gets hot in there!

3) I made a tensioning clamp out of two blocks of oak bolted together. A shallow groove carved in the block made sure the wire didn't chafe on the bolts. This let me put full tension on the wire without cutting a groove in my fingers.

MF