TOPIC:

A little back story, I just bought this bike about 2 weeks ago and have been going through it, come to find the previous owner had plans to work on it also. There's missing screws here and there holding covers on the sprocket and timing. My main concern right now is the electrical as I have plans to rebuild the carb starting this Monday. Currently, I am searching for a photo of how the battery box area is SUPPOSED to be arranged and I am missing two pieces of the puzzle and cant seem to figure out what the PDF version of the manual says due to resolution. I know my battery holder is missing brackets as well I have a used battery holder coming in. I will be providing photos and the items I am missing in the diagram and cant figure out. This is my first time working on a motorcycle and hope you all can provide me with the help I am looking for, thank you.

The items in the green boxes are accessory leads.
They are there if you want to add anything electrical to the bike.

Kawasaki.com & Partzilla and other places have diagrams. Partzilla is easiest to use.
The diagrams might help in figuring out the battery box.

www.partzilla.com/catalog/kawasaki/motorcycle/1981/csr-kz305-a1

www.partzilla.com/catalog/kawasaki/motor...ittings-battery-case

Okay thank you very much for that, that being said, those leads should stay open? also now brings the question, the left side blinkers, low beam (high beam works fine) and the tail light are not operating. any ideas as to what may be causing those issues? Thank you once again.

The accessory leads should have protective covers on them from the factory.
As for the lighting, first thing I'd do is make sure the bulbs are good & check for power.

note: modern bulbs may not work right w the stock turn signal flasher, so you'd have to get an electronic flasher. the auto parts store should have something. autozone has Novita flashers that're the same size. other places may also have the novitas. a common choice is a heavy duty trailer flasher.

From your circuit diagram it appears you don't have a plug to connect the headlight and signals to your main harness. Each wire is connected individually.

Kawasaki generally uses the same wiring colour codes on all their bikes. Black and yellow is ground. You should have a ground wire with a male terminal on each turn signal, coming to a double female connector. It looks like you have a gray wire on each turn signal. The right one connects to the green wire on your main harness and the left one connects to the gray main harness wire.

The plug for your headlight bulb should have 3 wires. One is a ground and should be black and yellow, connected to the other grounds mentioned above. The others look to be red and blue. Connect them to the red and blue wires on your harness. If the wires on your headlight plug are different, just try them one way and if they are wrong you will have your high and low beams switched. Reverse the wires and it should be correct.

Be sure all of the connections are clean. Apply a dab of dialectric grease if you have some.

Could be burnt bulbs.

Something that confused me last year.
One disconnected ground wire.

Took me hours to figure out.
It took out the headlight, brake lights, tail lights, turn signals.
1974 Honda CL250.

I'll figure out some tests you can do after i have some coffee.

Sounds like a few bad grounds.

Take a 4' length of wire. Put one end on the negative post of the battery. Take the other end and put it on the yellow/black wire coming off of the headlight.
Does your low beam and left turn signals work?

wrote:

A little back story, I just bought this bike about 2 weeks ago and have been going through it, come to find the previous owner had plans to work on it also. There's missing screws here and there holding covers on the sprocket and timing. My main concern right now is the electrical as I have plans to rebuild the carb starting this Monday. Currently, I am searching for a photo of how the battery box area is SUPPOSED to be arranged and I am missing two pieces of the puzzle and cant seem to figure out what the PDF version of the manual says due to resolution. I know my battery holder is missing brackets as well I have a used battery holder coming in. I will be providing photos and the items I am missing in the diagram and cant figure out. This is my first time working on a motorcycle and hope you all can provide me with the help I am looking for, thank you.
 

I don't mean to necro but this problem is so similar to mine. Same make, model, year, drive type...but my issue is that the harness is missing a few connections. I have some mystery wires. I also have a wire that looks like it should be a ground when tracing it in the wiring diagram but might not be, considering where it's spliced into. (Looks like a factory splice.) I get absolutely no power to the bike. New battery on it and everything. I know for a fact that the starter works since the guy I bought it from crossed a few wires onto a spare battery and it cranked over. I don't remember what wires he used but he said it was to bypass the switch. Not sure if he was talking about the ignition switch or the start button switch but I'm assuming it's the start button since that was broken. I've replaced the button since buying the bike. I've been discussing this same issue on the Kawasaki Motorcycle forums as well. I can link the topic if needed since I have all my pics uploaded there.

wrote:

Sounds like a few bad grounds.

Take a 4' length of wire. Put one end on the negative post of the battery. Take the other end and put it on the yellow/black wire coming off of the headlight.
Does your low beam and left turn signals work?

Does this mean the Yellow/Black wire or the Black/Yellow wire? (Yellow/Black usually means yellow w/black stripe and vice versa for Black/Yellow.) I honestly can't tell which one is actually the ground. Also, shouldn't I have a chassis ground going to the negative terminal of the battery? Also, There's a solid brown wire ending in a male bullet connector that's going towards the right side of the bike near the negative terminal of the battery. It's not connected to anything from that point. That same solid brown wire splits off and connects to several other things it looks like and there's a female blade terminal that it terminates in next to a solid orange wire that terminates the same way near the solenoid. I'm assuming that's for a turn signal relay but I'm not sure. As for the yellow/black wire (yellow w/black stripe), it has a ring terminal on it near the negative side of the battery, runs towards the left side of the chassis, splits off towards the front and rear of the bike respectively, and connects to absolutely nothing on either side from what I can tell. There's also a white/blue wire (white w/blue stripe) running alongside it from the front to the back and it also connects to absolutely nothing. I'm assuming these two wires are the accessory wires.

On another note, I tried to run a chassis ground wire, made from an old amplifier power wire from my old truck, to the negative terminal on the battery with nothing else connected to that terminal and the black/yellow wire started smoking where the headlight would normally be (currently have the HL disconnected and unmounted while I trace out connections) and it kind of turned a bit crispy. I basically fried the connection, sadly. If it were a mechanical issue on the bike, I would probably have already had it running again. Unfortunately, it's an electrical issue which is my weakest area. I tried using the wiring diagram but the colored wires look like they were drawn by my kindergarten self since the colors are blurry and run together or look like the wrong color. (I prefer plain black and white diagrams with a color key and the wires just labeled with the short versions of the wire color since I can understand that better.)

P.S. I would start my own thread on this but, honestly, this thread is already here and it's close enough to my issue...just maybe less severe.

Edit: I'm starting to think that I have a hot wire grounding out somewhere...or more than one. I can't be sure. I get continuity between the ground wire and pretty much every hot wire. at this point I'm about half tempted to just remove the entire wiring harness and just connect things one by one to diagnose it. I've been working on this bike for a few weeks and it's driving me crazy.