We made an attempt at getting it into Scott's ski yesterday but were thwarted by a bad battery ground terminal. It was late, his schedule was tight and I wasn't available for troubleshooting so he pulled the pin and swapped back to his old system so he would be ready to ride in the morning.
I got to his house right as he was finishing putting his old system back in and was ready to fire it up. He pointed to his ground and asked if I thought it could have been the problem? It literally broke right off in my hands so I'm fairly certain that was the issue. It was firing only firing on the #1 cylinder which it will do if the voltage is too low or if it can't crank above 400RPM. I brought it back home and threw it on the test bench and it ran perfect so I am pretty confident it was a voltage issue.
We'll find out shortly because I have made up a new ground cable and Scott is going to put it back in this week and give it another try. We were going to stick it in my ski but it's more conclusive if we use the same ski.
Besides that, everything went well. Installation was simple. He lined up the stator to the case marks, bolted in the flywheel and found spark right where it was supposed to be.
There had been some confusion about the setting of the static timing but all of that has been resolved now. Most of my confusion was caused by my own lack of knowledge of TL systems in general, compounded by my test bench not having an actual crank so I eventually had to mock up a spare engine just so I could properly index and mark TDC on my test flywheels. Once that was done, everything was spot on. Unfortunately, I had conveyed my findings before I fully understood them and send a few others on a wild goose chase for an issue that didn't really exist. So, I apologize for that one guys!
You can't check static timing on these like you would with other systems so it threw most of us for a loop. There were quite a few late phone calls between the collective group to work this out but eventually we all got on the same page and wrapped our heads around it. Since it won't spark until at least 200RPM, you just have to verify static while cranking.