Damn!
I think my greatest talent is making non-running bikes out of running ones. 🙂
Thursday afternoon, I was going to take the DRZ down to a local dealer to see if they had the new CBR250 to drool over, and to compare it to the VFR1200.
Now, my DRZ is a 2000 ‘E’ model, with the Baja Designs street-legal kit on it, for headlight, blinkers, etc. But the PO that installed it didn’t really do any kind of amazing job wiring up the front end. Not a super shitty one, either, but lots of unlabeled heat-shrinked quick connectors, and the ‘ignition’ was a simple DPDT switch placed inside a ziploc bag, and duct-taped shut for waterproofing, and zip-tied to the fairing.
So, I get on the bike and get *almost* further than I’d want to push it home, and it dies, and relights, and dies, and sputters, and dies. I coast to a stop, and it relights immediately. I check that there’s gas, and ride it back home almost uneventfully (two more brief episodes of dead….RUNNING!….dead………RUNNING!)
It acted *exactly* like you’d shut off the bike at speed – so the first thing I did was pull the fairing/headlight assembly off. I found that the PO had done the SHITTIEST job wiring things up. At least he chose a decent color of wiring to use *everywhere* – that being ‘seafoam green’. (Makes for a decent reminder what to do in October, I suppose!)
He used this thick (12 ga) wire to connect the switch to the wiring harness of the bike – and did the worst soldering job *EVER* where he’d twisted the end around the contact post on the bottom of the switch. It immediately became clear that I’d found my culprit – an intermittent connection between the Main Power Switch, and, you know…the rest of the bike!
The bike came with a TON of parts (to include everything I need to put in a 440 cylinder and head), and in the bin is an ignition with key, and 4 leads.
Even with the help of the wiring diagram in the Chilton Manual, it took me three days working on the front of the bike to figure out how to get power from the (obviously red) Always Hot 12v line at the front of the wiring harness to the (orange? WTF?) hot line at the CDI. I blew the 10a fuse at 9:30 at night at one point. 5 minutes after deciding to work on it some more. *sigh*
The next day, I bought 4 boxes of fuses from Autozone. Fortunately I only blew 3 more fuses before I figured out that the (unmarked, naturally) TINY LITTLE ORANGE WIRE provided 12v to the CDI.
Strip a little of that off, connect everything with waterproof crimp connectors (there’s a spare headlight/fairing, too – I want to be able to switch them at some point), and bada bing, bada boom, three days later and I’m off and riding again.
The turn signals still don’t work (but that should be fairly easy to reconnect properly), and I’m still not sure what’s causing the bike to feel…vague. They feel like they want to slide out from under me in corners sometimes, other times, they feel like they don’t have enough air (though I’ve checked over and over – dead on 15 PSI every time) and are all wibbly wobbly (though they are not timey-wimey)
Could be aging tires, but I’m not in a place right now to go buy some Distanzias, and I’m not sure I want to put the “new” knobby tires (coded from the very end of ’08, but always stored inside) on as an interim (even though I ride 99% street), or sell them to someone on CL for $50. *shrug*
I know I don’t want to put Kenda K761’s on – that’s what I had on the KLR, and the back end felt similar after probably 1200 miles or so – right turns especially. It’s a very disconcerting feeling (even though it feels like the lateral motion (if there is any in reality) is less than 1/4 inch), and I tense up, which doesn’t do anything but make the ‘slidey’ feeling worse. *Ugh*