Time To Kill (switch)

I was going to re-wire the entire electrical system. Seriously, I was considering that.

I'm still considering it, but not now, not if I'm going to get the bike running in time for the fall run.



You see, it won't idle, and it was occasionally blowing fuses (the one fuse), and I was fearing that there was some intermittent short somewhere buried in the wiring harness.

However since then I've disconnected the lead from the battery to the electric start system (yes there are two wires that clamp to the positive lead of the battery, one thick one for the electric start and a thin one for the rest of the electrical system) it hasn't blown the fuse, and I'm using a 7.5 in there instead of a 15 amp fuse, so current draw must be well within the realm of safety, right?

So for now I'm going to pretend like that little electric bugaboo doesn't exist and move on with troubleshooting the idle problems as if the electrical system is sound. So I'm moving on to things like points, air leaks, etc.

The carbs are often to blame for these problems but since I rebuilt them I'm leaning away from that. I'm going to start by checking for leaks at the intake manifold and move on to points/condenser next.



I do however need to tidy up the electricals a bit even if I don't plan on re-wiring the whole thing. At the moment the two cables that used to be threaded inside the handle bars are both sticking up from the gas tank with several wire nuts (of the wrong size, for sure) securing enough wires together to run the headlight on low and convince the motor that the kill switch is in the un-killing position. At a minimum I'd like to tie these two to a pair of switches so I can turn the motor off in the event of an emergency (I guess I could use the key…) and it would be nice to kill the headlight when I'm starting it, at least until it starts easier than it does now. As far as the rest of the wires are concerned, I think I'm just going to cap them off for now and tuck them away somewhere so they don't look so bad; I hate to cut them off in the event that I need to mess with them for troubleshooting (the tail light still doesn't work quite as it should). We'll see.

Of course I could just pull the tank and concentrate on getting that painted, and some other chassis/cleanup work that is in order and pretend like these engine problems are minor and leave them for later…that would be prudent eh?