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The starter motor on the 650 variants (e.g. CX650 and GL650) can seem tired at times, and it's not just the sprag clutch that has issues - the starter motor itself doesn't have the best grounding setup internally. To the best of my knowledge Hans (ofapars) was the first to do this and there have been a few good writeups of it since with different approaches. We're currently looking at two of them, but first the reasoning behind it.
The plate which holds the brushes/springs/etc. inside the starter motor has three raised tangs which contact matching pieces on the end piece of the starter motor, providing continuity to ground:
In practice the contact isn't great and you end up with arcing and subsequent pitting:
Having a dodgy ground isn't going to help your starter motor at all, and over time it will just get worse. The solution? Improve the route to earth. As a further point, it's also worth checking to see whether someone has over-tightened the outer nuts (or tried to loosen a stuck nut) and twisted the main power terminal, causing damage internally. Fortunately all of the motors we have had in-house have looked like this:
...but worth checking.
There's four different approaches that we have seen to this solution:
We'll be looking at the last two currently. This mod makes the biggest difference for the 650s, but it's not going to hurt your 500's chance of starting!
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