Electrical Failure

Update: This page was done before the Regulator/Rectifier problem was identified by Ailog. If you do the fix referenced in this section then you will probably not need to do this fix since you are effectively creating a bypass when you do the R/R fix.

The First Clue Something Was Amiss:

  
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I noticed that the lights on my LC were flickering, sometimes it was real hard to tell, sometimes it was easy to tell but something was definetly not quite right electrically. The dealership was little help but suggested I clean the battery posts and check the main ground.

I checked the battery, cleaned both the battery connections, cleaned the grounding connection from the battery to the frame and checked every electrical plug on the bike to try and find what was causing this occasional this problem. Somewhere in the process everything seemed to be working correctly... I was wrong in that assumption.

Dead Bike
  
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About 2 weeks later (July 8th) I went to my brothers house, which is 400 miles from home and discovered, one evening, that the bike was totally dead...not so much as an LED on the speedo display.

Paul and I then began what would turn out to be a 4 hour quest. We replaced the ignition, computer and starter relay and pretty much wore out an ohmeter testing wires. At the end of four hours we were no closer to identifying the problem. About the 5th hour we found the elusive problem.

  
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The LC gets all power for all things from a single wire that plugs into the starter relay (the starter relay is on the left side under the tank cover as shown in Figure 1). There are three wires, which plug into the relay (Figure 2). The solid red wire is the main power feed for the entire electrical circuit and is protected by a 30 amp fuse (Figure 3).

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