Hello!
It does not necessarily need many words to express my current “bike status”:
Winter Work (3)
This should be it! Guzzi is now looking forward to the 2014 season – she rumbled pretty well after I left my garage yesterday. But this is what happened before:
I gave the bike a proper cleaning last week which meant that I still had to polish all the steel/alloy/chrome bits. Nevr Dull, Luster Lace and standard hard wax for frame and body parts are my favorites for bringing back the 70s shine. It turned out to be the easiest job of the day, only leaving me with aching finger tips after I finished the spoke polish.
Worth it, of course – salt and rot were gone!
The final work – changing the turning light relay – could have been the job of a minute. But in fact, it wasn´t. Instead – the electrics drove me nuts, mainly because I hardly have any clue about it. I expected the relay to be the reason for turning light failure (completely dead) – so I tried all relays on stock.
But none of them worked – more investigation needed. I therefore opened the light switch on the left side of the handle bar which had been installed by my mates from Urban Motor a long time ago. And I discovered what in my eyes (!) was the reason for the malfunction: a broken connector plate (see arrow).
So I reconnected the plate through some tiny brazing. But the result was awful: The main lights switched on and off, driven by the turning light relay. Really confusing… So I also checked the fuses in the headlight.
And one of them was dead. I pushed a new replacement in the mounting and kept my fingers crossed. But still – the connection was wrong: Turning lights and headlights now blinking altogether.
What the heck…?!
The solution was utterly easy! Urban Motor re-wired the light switch to my individual needs last year. Since then it attached to both the main AND turning lights instead of only low and high beam. The On and Off switch of the front light had been re-located under the seat. So the disconnection of the plate was there for a reason!
Neither relay nor turning lights were mad. I just did a short-cut to the electrics through brazing everything together… Originally, only the fuse was broken and changing it could have been pretty easy. Instead, I spent two hours checking dangerous half-truths and even involved my dad who, honestly, had better things to do on a sunny Saturday afternoon than helping his frustrated son whilst reanimating a 42-year-old Italian motorbike.
So: Thanks!
The final solution was disconnecting the brazing on the plate again, fitting all fuses properly and putting the old and still-working relay into the system. A final plier tweak was done to the grounded metal light switch housing because it had slight contact to the electric supply of the turning light switch axle sometimes – and this gave the complete bike a shortcut resulting in behaviors I just cannot tell…
