Getting plugged
He’s back on the sparky warpath is our Ralph, yet again he’s making good connections.
As a motorcycle restorer, I see some heinous electrical sights during my working week; twisted together wires, covered with insulation tape is a favourite DIYER money and time-saving solution. As with so many similar bodges the old cliché ‘penny wise, pound foolish’ springs to mind; there is a reason why Mr Kawasaki and the more modern Mr Triumph don’t save money on connectors by twisting wires together when building bikes – they would have to replace many burned out wiring harnesses during the first year and their products would gain an undesirable reputation for unreliability. It was badly designed and manufactured electrics that contributed to the untimely demise of the old British bike industry. Do you remember that comic truism about British bikes? ‘Lighting by Lucas, the Prince of Darkness!’ Whenever I peel back badly wrapped insulation tape, there’s no knowing what I’ll find underneath. Shown on this page is the uncovering of bargain connectors for the fitting of Far East manufactured mini indicators, presumably purchased from flea bay, to a Kawasaki sports bike. By the time my customer bought his ZX-6R from the parsimonious DIY wiring ‘expert’, they did not work at all, if indeed they ever had. Because the bodger had buggered up the rear of the loom, I had to repair that as well. My customer supplied me with some more cheap and nasty mini indicators to replace them, which I fitted properly for him, but did caution that such cheap units probably wouldn’t last long, particularly as he used his bike in the winter. After one winter he took it for an MOT at a backstreet bike fettler in Bristol, who advised him that one of his indicators wasn’t working, but they would fix it for £15. I got a call that evening from him saying his bike wouldn’t start and smoke was pouring out from under the seat. When I got there I soon discovered that the MOT bodgers had connected the positive indicator feed, from the alarm, to an earth wire in the loom instead, which burned out the main wiring harness as soon as the alarm was set. Luckily for my customer, lots of ZX-6RS are crashed and written off so the breakers have shelves groaning under the weight of looms for crutch rockets and are only too happy to
sell them for a fraction of the new cost, but it still cost him a good few of my hours to change the harness over. The photo above was a bodge I uncovered on a customer’s bike that actually made me laugh; it was so bad that words failed me. It was of course buried in half a roll of the obligatory insulating tape. In September’s article I explained why one shouldn’t solder joints on motorcycle wiring unless absolutely necessary. To every rule there is always an exception and one in this respect is handlebar switch gear, where the wires tend to be soldered to the switch components. In the top right photo, following the tracing of an electrical fault I uncovered a soldered joint where someone had added to the loom. In the picture you can see that the joint was overheated in the process so the insulation on the wire being joined has became so hot it has started to melt into the neighbouring wiring. The conductors clearly weren’t cleaned thoroughly so the solder hasn’t flowed properly. You can see that the white with blue tracer wire nearby has had its insulation damaged so there was a distinct possibility that the soldered joint could touch the conductor of that wire. Where this bodgery had caused problems, heat was generated which caused the insulation tape glue to go all runny making a nasty sticky mess for me. IPA (Isopropyl Alcohol) is the best stuff for cleaning up old glue and electrical parts in general. You can buy it from Maplins in a 400ml aerosol, but litho printers use it and their suppliers sell it in five litre bottles at a much better rate! I use lithographic IPA and decant it into chemical spray bottles. I repaired this mess with a number of butt splices insulated with heat shrink.