9/14/2018 7:44 PM
Edited Date/Time: 9/14/2018 7:45 PM
OK, did some thinking and reconstructing of events and have pretty much figured out why this happened. When My son and I installed the flywheel, then went to set the timing, we had to rotate the stator plate all the way, full lock, to the right to get the timing correct. All the pics I've seen, and from what I can remember, the timing was correct when the stator plate was more centrally adjusted. So, maybe the flywheel wasn't positioned over the woodruff key, so the flywheel was off. If that was the case, that would account for having to adjust the stator plate rotated all the way to the right. If this was true, the flywheel would have been slightly off center, on the shaft, causing the flywheel to bump into the stator plastic housing and may have worn through the stator plastic and touched coil wires causing a short.
No sure if you can tell in the attached picture, but if you zoom it, you can see the woodruff key slot to the center, left, and silver metal just to the right of that, where the woodruff key actually was positioned when we torqued the flywheel bolt down. I think that is why we experienced the failure.