Misfire

Got to say I cannot give a difinative answer on the coil situation. I thought that these coils were double ended and the HT side had no earth connection. The two spark plugs were effectively in series. Therefore if you take off one plug cap you should get no spark at all. Someone on here did say that he still got a spark if he removed one plug cap. So I am now not sure. Never tried it, it shouldn't really be done on electronic ignition as the high voltages induced can break down coil insulation.
The official way is to short out to earth the plug that you want to stop sparking. Not easy with the type of plug caps that we have. Well you could stick a piece of wire up in the plug cap and short the end to earth with an insulated screwdriver.
Take care though the HT is painful in contact with fingers !!
What I did once to prove the point was to swap the HT leads over, the problem then is that one lead is too short. I just stuck a piece of insulated wire up inside the plug cap and wrapped the other end around the spark plug connection. I just kept it away from the frame and my fingers. For me it proved the point, told me that my problem was carburation and not electrical.
Hope that makes a bit of sense.
Mike.

That's logically correct- why are you doubting yourself? If the LH cylinder has a misfire, pulling that plug cap off will just drop the bike onto the RH cylinder only. Pulling the RH plug cap will drop the engine onto the faulty LH cylinder, so the engine stops. That's not testing anything specific to do with the coil or the ignition system though, just "switching" off each cylinder.

If you swapped the plug leads over- (difficult as mike says as the leads may not reach- but just temporarily unbolt the coil) you would then be testing the HT Lead, cap and resistor. Not the coil though. I would swap the plugs as well. Check when you do that the gaps have not closed up- we have examples of the outer electrode getting whacked by the piston. We never got to the bottom of it, maybe dodgy Chinesium "NGK" spark plugs. Also you have had the head skimmed?

Apart from testing the primary and secondary coil resistances with a good multimeter, thats about it for investigating the coil. We have a thread on here where the good readings are given. Next would have to be a coil swap to a known good one.

Theoretically the plugs are in series across the coil secondary- so one fires opposite polarity to the other. But I have had good sparks with one cap off often- I think 30-40kV electricity is a bit of a slut as to who it goes with and will find a ground somewhere!

You can check spark strength- Honda used a gap tester- but in a dim garage you can set up similar to this and visually see how good both sparks are and also the static timing...

Thanks for the feed back dudes!

I bought a balancing gage for the carbs and it runs sweet as now!! No misfire atall. If I take my plug caps of now though (I know you shouldn't) but they both cut the engine now?! Is that a good or bad thing. But it's runnin sweet so it's no problem.

Just posted a thread about stainless steel exhausts. If I could post a picture I'd show you what the previous owner had done. You would all be shocked to say the least!

Hope to hear back