Gone are the days when you have to kick start your bike, though to be honest, the feeling of it was something out of the world. And even today when all else fails, kick start is the only thing that comes to your rescue. But then there are practical limitations to everything and of course we are consumers always want something better and simpler. So along came Electric Start system. Now the principal at which electric starter works is pretty much same as that of kick starts, just the work that our legs do is now done by an electric motor. Let’s see how it works.The electric starter is in fact an electric motor which is powered by the battery of your vehicle. The starter is directly connected with the engine with geared milling, once the current passes through the electric motor when you push the ignition button the motor rotates and it also rotate the crank shaft of the engine which is connected with piston. Eventually this movement of the electric motor cranks the engine just like you do it while kick starting the engine.
The main motive of an Electric Start system is to crank the engine so that the chain of successful ignition starts. But making a spark is not really as easy as simply providing an electrical current. There is a need for some electrical charge to get accumulated and a larger voltage is required to discharge this current which results in a spark. This is what happens in Electronic Ignition Systems.The current coming in from your battery is a DC current and that needs to be converted to AC for the electronics to work for which an inverter is used which then provides the current to the coil and hence the coil accumulates the charge in it until it can resist and once the resistance threshold has been crossed, the entire current is discharged as a spark which leads to ignition. It might sound like a large process but in reality it takes less than a second to happen.
The entire process of creating a spark means constantly charging and discharging of the capacitor which is used for sparking. The reason being that capacitors can hold a large amount of charge and have more resistance which leads to better sparking altogether. The only issue here is, this is a conventional way of sparking and is fine for bikes running smaller engines. But when you want the sparking to happen on a much faster rate, then the solution for it is using a CDI.
So all in all this is how the Electric Start System works. The concept overall is simple, to use the current from the battery to crank the engine and to get the bike to life and that’s all it takes. Just make sure that if your bike does not start in a single go, do not keep the ignition switch pressed on for a long time else it will drain your battery pretty well and completely.
By: Pratik Patole