Good morning. We have had many sad sleds come into the shop and each tell an interesting story before they get into shape to go back out on the snow. The mention of a fire is to me pretty important suggesting that the engine was very likely pushing fuel out of the intake. To me, any time I see fire I immediately suspect an air leak. Air leaks generally come from a few places including crank seals, intake boots, and open primer fittings.
After throwing my arm out trying to start new-to-us sleds (only maybe 1 in 10 actually came to us with the ability to run semi-reliably) I made the executive decision that I was not even going to try to run an engine until I went through and eliminated as many of the variables to not running that I could. This meant tearing down and inspecting the engine, replacing crank seals, replacing carb jets and fuel needle/seat, new Mikuni carb boots, new fuel lines, rebuilt fuel pump, new pistons/rings, and new plugs (BR9EYA). I had to have a mechanic friend do our first engine. After that we bought a few critical tools - clutch puller, harmonic balancer puller, bearing splitter, bore gauge, micrometer - and a lot of Brakekleen.
This approach would take care of all the mechanical issues. Then the only unknowns to us were the electronics. We have not had CDI problems, mostly we have problems with spark coils and occasionally the pulser or exciter will go bad. And since we could not tell if they worked or not until the engine was assembled and in the sled, we finally broke down and used some excess bad parts to build a test engine for the work bench that was configured to test the electronics and the fuel pump.
With all that said, do you have a manual? The manual is well written, has great diagrams and is invaluable for repairing and maintaining these sleds. If you don't have one, send me a PM.
Topic: Invader 440 no start (Read 2625 times)