Quote:
Originally Posted by thegregbradley
My bike has been making sort of a god awful screech when trying to start, kind of every now and then. Today, after work I went to start the bike and it would ONLY make that noise, then the starter wouldn't crank the engine over at all... it just freely spins.
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Okay, I've been waiting for somebody to chime in on this thread with the true cause of the "spin and screech" situation, but it doesn't look like that's gonna happen and it's too painful to keep standing by idle...
What you (the original poster) have here is a Starter Clutch problem. The "spin and screech" happens when the "pawls" of the Starter Clutch fail to properly grab onto the Starter Motor Clutch Gear. The bike's Starter Clutch is a "Sprag" type clutch which depends on spring-actuated pawls to grip inward onto another surface (in this case the inner surface is a collar that extends off of the Starter Motor Clutch Gear).
Obviously your Starter is working just fine, if it wasn't there would be no spinning of the starter gear-train which is resulting in the Starter Clutch "spin and screech".
Here's a drawing taken from the Kawasaki EX250 Motorcycle Service Manual, page 8-17, which shows an exploded diagram of the parts of the Starter Clutch.
The part that isn't working properly on your EX250 is the combination of numbers 4,5,6 which are the spring-actuated pawls (there are three complete sets of 4,5,6 contained within the Starter Clutch). On your bike one or two of these sets of parts are not working properly.
In rare cases the "spin and screech" problem can also be caused by a cracked Starter Clutch wheel (item #2 in the picture that I linked). When the Starter Clutch wheel develops a crack it creates extra room in the area around one or more of the pawls which prevents them from being able to grab tightly onto the Starter Motor Clutch Gear.