We should start a club. I purchased a Phantom V3 last year. Figure third time's a charm. Surly the engineering department got it right this time.........
Well I'm overall disappointed with it. What good is all that power & torque when the damn thing is very difficult to start 85% of the time. That's why it's named Phantom 85 V3 !!! But if I get lucky and it does start , yes it runs great with more than enough power to spare. I served in USAF as a mechanic. I'm aware of most all of the factors causing it not to run.I replaced , CDI with a BRR volt master stage 2 it comes w/ a sperate coil. Plus a new magneto HP type . Just wasted 4 hrs.re-wiring the whole ignition system. Ran ohms check on CDI& magneto.337 and 6.9 Extra careful with wires upon installation .Guess what, No spark. I also drained crankcase of excess fuel. Very frustrated. Motor has less than 3hrs. run time. A waste of time and money.
The hard starting comes from a few factors.
1 - brand new rings and cylinder. Compression isn't quite all there yet, especially on the Phantom. In an effort to keep them safe/cool they run 2 base gaskets to set a large squish gap and keep the compression low. Add a fresh engine, which doesn't have the best compression at first, and it can be a pain to start. The fact that the iron rings have to bed into a cross-hatched ceramic liner also means the break in period is a lot longer than most plated 2 strokes.
2 - the Phantoms suffer from the same issue as most of these cheap 2 strokes due to the simplistic nature of the magneto and cdi, which is too much spark advance. That makes it even harder to cold start.
3 - combine those 2 and then toss in a lot of flooding from multiple start attempts and you get a whole lot of fun.
Because of reason 2, your installation of that BBR ignition, which is a waste of money, likely advanced that ignition even more. The original CDI the Phantoms come with are actually an upgrade over the standard ones as the internal components are of a higher quality.
My Phantom was definitely a hard starter for the first 100 miles or so. Once the rings really started to seat in it got easier and easier to start. Mind you, I also did a lot of work to my engine that increased the compression ratio. A big one being that I set my squish gap to .9mm, originally 1.77mm (quite a difference eh?). I also had a lot of slop in the keyway on the magnet for my magneto, so I used brass shim stock to take up the gap, and I favored the side that helped retard the ignition slightly. If it made a huge difference, I don't know, but having the magnet secured and unable to slap around side to side is never a bad thing.
Also, keep in mind that ANY sort of leak anywhere on the engine - base gasket, exhaust, intake, etc. will all also affect these things.
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