dead cdi

[v8 westy]

am trying to get a kawasaki quad to run . it will start and run roughly with a little popping and banging. if you turn the lights on the engine will die straight away, have changed coil for new makes no difference, the wires to the coil when i put the multimeter on to check the voltage i got a strange reading on the meter like a large capital 1,
am i correct in thinking i should be getting 12 volts to the coil from the cdi? its been a few years since i last fiddled with bikes and am a bit rusty any pointers appreciated.

[podman]

Is the battery to be a known good item?

Reason I say that is that my GSXR refused to start whilst out on it one day, whilst the battery checked out fine statically, a cell was duff and soon as a load was put on it(like the lights) it caused the battery to "drop out"..Make sure you do a load test on it if you havent already.

[v8 westy]

yes battery is fine tried the battery off my cbr and it was just the same. had something similar years ago on a gp100 turned out to be the insulation on the stator windings breaking down but this looks fine on this quad

[shunter V8]

I think most systems work on the principle of coming out of the charging coils in A.C. so make sure your meter is set in that range then it goes to the rectifier/regulator and gets converted to DC.