[Christ]

I think I'm going to remove the electric start feature altogether, and see how it runs with all the lights hooked up and working (still want to replace them all with LED's... ) and no battery or any sort of load equalization.

If something doesn't work out correctly, I'll see about getting a 12V cap to put in from any old piece of hard electronics laying around.

How do I wire a bank of caps? (I assume in parallel...)

The only ones I might have are pieces that come from low-end consumer electronics, such as old computer mobo's and the like. I'm not sure the capacity of those will really be sufficient to level the load, so to speak.