Comforting to know that someone else (the person who donated the CDIs to me to finish this project) has already taken my work and is attempting to possibly manufacture a competing model.
Just a bit of background information on this project. I have been working on this off and on for the past 10 years, had a lot of notes, but mainly needed a few more broken CDIs to finish the last bit of this schematic. This guy was complaining about it on a facebook group, I showed him my notes, he had some additional ones that he got from someone else years ago. He sent me his broken CDIs, and from that I was able to complete the schematic, build and test it and so on. The further progress I made he started asking for things I thought were unnecessary for this project. Such as the removable connector. I asked why is this necessary, and he wanted to be able to quick change the CDI in case it fails. I was saying if you're at that point where you are constantly swapping out CDIs and need a quick connector for this then you have a deeper issue that needs solved. I am not doing that and modifying the case design for this purpose. If you want to do such a thing, buy a kit, and put some connector closer to the box or whatever. I added some mounting holes in the 5th revision mainly for him, though I think this is a bit silly.
He doesn't know much about his own bike, he asked a lot of questions, claimed to know somethings about electronics but he was usually wrong or confused when I gave answers to his questions. Maybe he was feeding for more information, I have no idea any more. At some point I mostly stopped answering him because he couldn't even figure out that 1N4002 was a diode. If you can't understand that, you shouldn't be attempting to make these circuits and should buy a pre-soldered kit or the completed unit, in my opinion.
I don't know who this guy is specifically. He has no idea of these forums, just fb groups and does not know how to use a computer very well. I just kind of chalked him up to being a goofy old timer.
But he did mention he was in touch with people from France and elsewhere over the years to try and make a CDI for him and people would ignore him (wonder why?) after a while and he really wanted to get his bike running again. Gave me a sob story about how he loved this bike, and it was a real shame there are no options out there for these bikes.
I don't know who made up this slightly modified board design (I also noticed it's been changed to be a true dual layer board, with a modified component layout, probably to make it dissimilar enough from my version); but I would suspect the guy in France as this guy can't figure it out himself. But I can assure you that if it does come down to a competing version (which I really hope this does not, it should not be like this in a small niche community) that I'm using the proper components and a lot of work has been poured into this to make it everything it should be and you expect it to be.
I'm a bit upset by this as I gave the guy a discounted completely assembled kit (cases are not made yet, he just wanted the pre-assembled kit to mount himself he claimed), even a blank PCB to experiment with (which was the older prototype PCB that was larger). He never used the CDI, I followed up with him as I was excited to hear about someone using my work and being happy that their bike finally runs again. Instead, he said his bike started one night, not the next and he was still playing around with old CDI. At that point, he began shotgunning parts and clipping wires and jumpering them based on bad advice on facebook groups. That's about when I got fed up with this guy. I originally made the detailed instruction thread on what to test for your stator, etc. BECAUSE of this guy. I gave him a word document in facebook and email directly and a link to the thread. He never read any of them, instead just started assuming it HAS to be this wrong with it or THAT is wrong with it and I'd follow up with "did you test the stator?", "did you test the relay?", "did you test the coil?", and so on and he never did. I asked if he needed help with that, but he didn't. He's soldered heath kits back in the day, did some ham radio he knows what's up. So, OK.
And yeah, I know that selling as a kit is a risk because anyone can just buy the kit one time then copy it with some effort. And it may be inevitable. But with something so oddly niche specific I figured it was mostly unlikely. It's not like a CB750 where everyone wants parts for it. If it happened, I figured it would be after I sold a few of these to make up the hundreds of dollars and my personal time on this project. I made the kits an option, at a risk to me, because I know what it's like. Having a bike and no money, it may actually be your only means of transportation. It was for me in my 20s. My wife at the time used my car and I rode that CM400A year round, even in the snow, because it's automatic you can drag your feet and blip the throttle at 3mph in a snow storm and not stall out. I have been there. The kits are mainly intended for people like that.
Sorry for the stream of consciousness story/rant here. Just a bit dissuading.