‘The wiring was so bad the bike could have caught fire any second’
Neil Sawbridge got a nasty shock when he inspected this Gold Wing’s wiring
Very few ten-year-old Gold Wings have remained standard as extravagant owners seem hellbent on adding a personal touch. Whether it’s murals on the panniers, more running lights than an artic, or speakers that would substitute for a sound system at the Notting Hill Carnival, there’s plenty of scope for riders to ‘express’ themselves.
But when Neil Sawbridge, of Doncaster Motorcycles, got a customer’s newly acquired 2008 Wing up on the ramp, he got a nasty shock (almost literally) when he found a mish-mash of multicoloured running lights.
When the new owner got his bike home he found that some of the lights were behaving themselves, but others were flashing unpredictably and a couple of LED strips around the topbox were as dead as a dodo. But he still wanted them to work, so Neil began to trace the wiring.
“It took seconds to see where the problems were,” said Neil. “Whoever fitted them had simply run the wires around the outside so everything was covered in grime. It looked like he’d run out of connectors at some point as he’d simply twisted two wires together in places, wrapped some tape around them and left them hanging.” Neil stripped out all of the dodgy wiring and rebuilt the circuit from scratch. The bodger had wired them into the lighting circuit, but Neil set them up separately. “If you use the same circuit for both systems there is a risk that you will put too much load through the loom. With the increased voltage you could get a component burning out or even a bit of wiring catching fire.”
So Neil spent four hours doing a first fix, removing bodywork and routing the wiring to a separate switch on the handlebars. All the new connectors were vehicle-spec bullets heat-shrunk into place and with electrical grease as an extra line of defence. The job cost just £140.
‘He’d run out of connectors and just used tape’