headlights out

I had quite a headache when my headlight kept going out. Sometime's it'd work, sometimes it wouldn't. Turned out that the gas tank was pinching a wire (brown wire as I remember) up against the frame causing a short. With the tank off to test the wires, everything checked out fine. I went through several fuses and a good bit of confusion before figuring that one out.

That "round thing" with a wire attached in your bucket sounds like the wire to your blinkers, mine has a large round lug and I bet that's what you are looking at. It attached to the blinker stems inside the headlight bucket. Do you have blinkers on stems or the handlebar type blinkers?

Regardless, it is time to study a colored wiring diagram for your bike and start tracing things.

Also is the new fuse block you have similiar to the one I posted? Does each fuse have two connections? Or do you have a "ganged" type?

Have fun and good luck!

Post edited by: OKC_Kent, at: 2007/04/26 14:47

About where to buy wire; I had 50 ft spools of assorted wire in solid colors and used that. You can buy wire labels from WW Grainger or maybe McMaster-Carr. Check Radio Shack for labels too.

Kaw used color coded wire, I can't locate this in small amounts, if any one knows please post it.

The broken off metal thing is a ground wire that goes to the headlight bucket. Mine were broken too. There's supposed to be 2 of them I think, one on each side. They are available from Z-1 cheap, or you can just ground the wire to the bolt which it sounds like your PO already did.

As far as your other problems... First thing I would do is follow the wiring and make sure nothing has come unplugged. There are a lot of "bullet" connectors to allow you to unplug parts of the wiring, sometimes when you start working on something in one place you inadvertantly tug on the wiring and cause it to unplug somewhere else. On my 1000 there is a big mess of these bullet connectors under the tank and I check them every time I have the tank off because I have unplugged them by accident before. They may not even LOOK unplugged so just push them together to make sure they are really plugged in.

ok, i got that all settled. im an idiot...i only had one good fuse when i replaced the box, so i was putting it into each circuit to see if they were working. so when i took it out of the main slot, the others wouldnt work. duh. i guess i didnt realize that the main fuse was the MAIN fuse. i thought it was just for the ignition. so, thats all taken care of and my new headlight is a ton better. thanks for all your help. by the way that broken piece was from the other side in the bucket. he just had put a huge washer in there to replace it, thats why i didnt notice it before. now the bike has a stumble again at low rpm so im going to put up a new post, come check it out! thanks again.