Electrical issues

[JohanC]

Guys,

Some advise please.

Some time ago, approx 4 months back, the F1 light started to come on on my 2002 Black Bird. Knowing the possible cause of this malfunction i did open up the "conector block" on the left side, the one which is only used to test electrics when bike is built. Found some nasty deposits in this block and after cleaning it out completely, the bike ran well again.

However, the day before yesterday the same started to happen again, meaning the F1 light and ocassional dying on me. Did manage to get home and again i got to this conector. To my surprise the one side was completely melted away and obviuosly there was no alternative but to do the soldering thing, meaning i had to cut all the wires and connected these by means of soldering and heat skrink. Again afterwards the bike started fine and actually got me to work this morning.

The interesting part is that although i did find various posts on the permanent fix, these posts all talk about 10 green wires on the one side of the conector and 3 on the other. The conector block on my Bird however only have 7 green wires on the one side and 3 green on the other side. I seperated these wires, refering to the posts on the topic, and soldered them seperately together, meaning i've got now two sets of wires of which one is the 7 soldered together, and the second is the 3 also soldered together. What is interesting is that it appears that the male part of the conector, the piece that fits in the conector, makes all 10 wires conect to each other, the 3 on the one side and the 10 on the other.

Once done the bike fired up immediately and ran fine, no more F1 light etc.

On my way to work this morning all of a sudden the Bird started to miss and i had to keep it going with the trottle. Got to work and after stopping saw that all the lights are very dim. Switched off and afterwards cannot get it to start again. The is absoletely not enough power to swing the motor and if the startor swich is activated, it just take the last current from the sytem and all lights go dead.

My question is if with seperating the wires from the conector block (remember there seems to be 3 and 7 connected together) could i have caused the charging system to malfunction?. If not, what else could have gone wrong since i am worried sick at the moment. The battery seems fine and in fact were fully charged lately. I did check it on a tricle charger which indicate fully charged.

I am at a lost here and any advise to eiter trace the fault or fix it would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Johan

[Furbird]

I know on my 99 dragbike, there are two of those test ports, one is ground-based back by the rear tire, and the other one is positive-based and is next to the valve cover on the clutch side of the bike on the frame rail. I had to bypass both to solve all my problems on that bike, not to mention completely replace a couple of wires because the corrosion had gotten through the entire length of the wire. I don't know if that applies to your bike, but it's worth looking in to.

[Manhook]

I had a problem that was similar to this... ride the bike, everything starts going dead, and will only run with throttle. Got off it, and it came back to life but when I hit the starter switch, everything went black. Tried to get it started rolling down a hill on the short push home, and it would barely fire and wouldn't run. After a lot of looking and playing with the wires you're talking about it ended up being a really funky battery failure. Would work sometimes and sometimes it wouldn't. I replaced the battery and haven't had a problem since. Probably not your problem, but it taught me to never ever assume a battery is good even if it takes a charge and has voltage.