Hi everyone, I

dissy must be in wrong, it has to be put in correctly at TDC (top dead centre). theres probably an article in the tech section about how to do it, else google knows everything. not hard u just need a big (26 is it?) size spanner to turn over the motor manually. dont try this yourself for the first time, unless youve read up on it at least.
new points is a good idea (why not a new distributor cap and rotor at well), the points should be put in and tuned by someone who knows what theyre doing. a timing gun will be needed to get initial timing right. if you have a 1200 manual it should tell you how to do a lot of this stuff. goodluck!

hmmm if you say she runs ok when you speed I would think it could be a sticking needle and seat in the carb but it's hard to say without looking at it, maybe replace the fuel filter and run some fresh high octane fuel and a reputable fuel syatem cleaner, perhaps over time the fuel has lost it's octane, happened to my girlfriends bike, after storing it over winter then taking it out in summer it would run fine then start to die when it warmed up I pulled over at the closest BP servo and filled the tank with ultimate 98 fuel started it back up again and 5 minutes down the road the problem was gone!

Sure sounds like a fuel problem to me. Maybe dirty fuel filter has lead to crap in carbi.
I'm in Canberra so PM me if you get really stuck and I can try and find the time to have a chat about it.

Paul.

Ok - so playing with the distributer was probably a very bad idea - ill push it to a mechanic and see if i can at least get them get the car starting again..

Paul - I changed the fuel & air filters & tried running it on premium with a fuel cleaner addative on the last drive... though maybe something is really stuck in there. Once the car is starting again ill probably take you up on htat offer mate!

Im going to take it to a mechanic tommorrow & keep you updated. thankyou very much for all your input!

-John

Take the dizzy out, & take no. 1 spark plug out, turn the engine over by hand untill no. 1 piston is at the top, & the timming mark on the pully is at top dad centre, then put the dizzy back in so that the rotor button is pointing towards the no. 1 lead on the dizzy cap, try & start it, you cant hert anything, if it backfires badly (make sure the air cleaner is on) take the dizzy out (as it's 180deg out) turn the engine over one full turn & install as above. that gets you back to the original problem.
Try taking fuel line off the carb & get some one to crank it for you & see how much fuel is getting through, could be stuffed pump or an obsruction is the line or tank.
Trev
Aus

Update-

Finally back on the road after lots of screwing around.

It turns out it was a combination of allot of problems...

I tried fixing the problem through a series of elimination; first I changed the plugs, leads and coil - but no improvement...

Then I thought it might be the dizzy, and after figuring out how the hell to put one in and get the car running again (allot of reading and screwing around - thanks for the advice trev) the car started and ran great for about 25kms..

Then died again!

I figured, it couldn

Glad the 1200 is back on the road and running well.

It's good of you to continue the thread with the solution to your problem.

It's always frustrating to hear about someones big problems and never hear how they solved it.

I just bought a new coil for my 1200, maybe I'll double check the part number one more time before I install it.

Happy motoring!

I had something like that happen...
Turned out that i had bad spark plugs, a bad coil lead, which killed my HVC which may have killed the ignition module.

to top it off i had just switched to lpg.

finally got it fixed though.

paid $30 to a shop to have the compression tested, Got a free tow ( thanks to the wife for the AAA ) and bought a spare old skool dizzy with no ign module and a spare CDI module and coil and a replacment coil lead.

so it cost about $200 and a week or more of fooling around.

it's kind of scary when you can't get any help because your car is too custom.