Split harness.

View from top. Nice short wires, neatly heat shrink wrapped and mounted.

It doesn’t look bad, and it’s not terribly awkward. I have something in mind for the future, but for now it will do. Tomorrow morning I’m adding a switch for the headlight (on/off) and mounting it somewhere away from the bars, that will leave me with just the starter switch to deal with which will remain near the throttle.

I don’t think I ever really looked inside even when I was installing the clubmans.

Filthy. I suspect Honda used some kind of dialectic grease on the sliding mechanism and all sorts of dirt and grime collected in there for 35 years.

It really is a mechanical wonder but could have been engineered with a much more simplistic design. The first thing I knew needed to go was the Orang/White and Light Blue/White wires. They belonged to the running lights on the original turn signals. It’s these wires I suspected might be causing my no-blinky malfunction. Let’s clip them and toss them for good.

After I took the whole switch apart I cleaned the grease off of everything, including the weird sliding switch mechanism.

Filthy.

These little sliding things come off too.

Shot of the rails.

The spring switch part was also covered in grease and grime. One more interesting aspect of this piece is that there is a ball bearing that’s used to either: 1.) Ground the switch, or 2.) Help slide the switch from left to right. Be very careful and don’t drop it and lose it.

The bottom housing, once again stuffed with some kind of lubricant or grease.

I cleaned every bit of it.

Here you can see the ball bearing back in the housing. It sits in a little triangle groove which has a slit that runs left and right. The other set of wires that I found odd in the switch were the Brown/White wires. The CB550 manual defines these as the tach and speedo bulb wires. Meaning that the lights in the speedo and tach are for some reason running into the turn signal switch which means they are also unnecessary in here. The Brown/White wires are set up to be actively fed power either in the middle, left or right switch mode. Totally unnecessary, we can feed those bulbs power from within the headlight bucket. Let’s de-solder them and get them out of here.

There, as it should be. All we need are the left and right turn signal wires and the pulsing gray wire coming from the relay.

I also went ahead and trimmed some more length off the wires in the headlight bucket.

As a rule of thumb if I take off a fastener that’s rusted or stripped I never put it back on so these bolts are going in the trash.

My local hardware store didn’t have the stainless steel fasteners in the 25mm length I need to replace the originals so I had to get black. These black allen head bolts will eventually rust. I coated them with a little WD40 before installing them.

So, all done and still I’m not getting any blinky-blinky. The lights just come on and stay on as they did before. I have successfully narrowed down the problem. It’s not the switch. Now I’ll have to look carefully at the ground wires in my bucket.

Good day gentlemen. See you next weekend.

Last week I removed the points plate from the advance assembly but didn’t unhook it from the wiring harness. The procedure is fairly easy and a matter of simply pulling the blue and yellow wires from the harness.

Here is a pic of my old points plate removed from the wiring harness. It’s still works and I’m going to keep it just in case things don’t work out with the Dyna-S.

Since I was down there pulling wire, I decided to replace the right side engine case bolts that held the points plate wire in place. The bolts were frozen and pretty chewed up but the metal tabs that held the wire in place were still good.

Brand spankin new Dyna-S.

After removing the spark advance assembly, I had to remove the points cam by twisting to the the right and pulling.

Next, I had to slip on the black magnet cylinder thingy. In order for it to sit perfectly in the advance assembly the spring mechanisms must be pulled out so the black magnet cylinder slides down and engages with the notches

I lined up the number “1″ with points 1-4 on the advance assembly.

Slide the Dyna rotor over it and bolt down with some shiny new stainless steel allen head bolts.

Then I slid out the rubber grommet from the old points wire.

Split it with a razor blade.

Placed it on the Dyna-S cable and in the slot in the engine case.

Ran the the cable through new stainless steel allen bolts.

White wire goes into the blue, black goes into the yellow. The red wire is spliced into the 12v brake light wire. I’ll post more pics of the splicing next weekend. The next post will cover static timing the Dyna.

I’ve mentioned before that I always feel a bit like an archeologist when working on this bike. I begin to notice strange things that the previous owner did. Or perhaps the previous, previous owner did. The ground cable is no exception. It wasn’t wrapped in with the rest of the harness. It was running along side it.

This burnt out ground could explain a lot of things. Perhaps it was the root of my non-blinky blinker problem?

Needless to say, I cut it off as close to the main harness as I could so I could splice it with a better piece of wire.

I also noticed that the frame were the other end of the ground connected was particularly oxidized and rusted.   

I had never considered looking here or cleaning it up until this morning. I hit it with my dremel rotary tool with a wire brush bit. It took the rust off in seconds and exposed some nice clean steal for my ground connection.

All in all a good morning, and I’m fortunate to have stumbled on the ground wire issue. Clearly, a closer inspection is due tomorrow.

I tried using an LED relay from Harrison Specialties. It didn’t work.

I tried replacing the stock thermal flasher with an electronic one. Still no blinky.

I returned the electronic flasher for another. Nope.

I finally decided to buy a ELFR-1 from customled.com and still nothing.

It dawned on me that my problem had nothing to do with the flasher or relay, it most likely was my wiring in the headlight bucket.

So, I decided to take it apart and put it back together again.

I cut every wire. I cut for two reasons:

1. I wanted to shorten the wires to make a little more room in the bucket. The excess length was from installing the clubman bars.

2. I wanted to replace the bullet ends.

My process began with stripping the thick black plastic harness, then cutting around 6 to 7 inches off each wire. Oh, I decided to remove the turn signal buzzer also. Now I wonder if removing it contributed to my LED signals working.

All wired up with new bullet connectors. I also cleaned the ground connections.

Custom LED electronic flasher relay ELFR-1.

Two prong. Plug and play. Red on flasher goes to black on the bike. Black on flasher goes to grey on bike.

My new ELFR-1 sitting nice and cozy in the stock rubber mount. My new front signals, also LED, should arrive by the end of the week. I’ll take some video of all the signals on friday. I’ll post soon.

Behind the fuse box are six wires, two for each fuse. Each of of those wires travels up and into a female white plastic connector, which connects to a white plastic male connector and then back into six colored wires. All that bulk can be eliminated and replaced by splicing the wires from the white plastic connector and soldering on blade fuse sockets. The blade fuse sockets wouldn’t need to be mounted to the metal harness like the current fuse box they could simply be tucked away under the seat.

I don’t know what this thing is. I didn’t bother looking it up in the Clymer manual. But, its just kinda floating there, held on by the rubber mount. That piece can also be tucked away under the seat.

Just looking at the electronics under the side cover I realize much of the content can be streamlined in some manner.

Just brainstorming. Too much to do before I start tinkering with hiding the wiring.

This morning I picked up two electronic flashers. One 2 prong, and one 3 prong. Neither of them worked. When activated, the turn signals just remain on, they don’t blink. This is because both flashers are load sensitive. They require the lights to pull the correct current before shutting off and then turning back on. Since LEDs draw less current they will never trigger the load sensitive flashers.

The relay I got from Harrison Specialties didn’t help either. So, since I have no intention of changing out my beautiful LED turn signals, I will have to resort to purchasing a true LED Flasher Relay that is not load sensitive and is built specifically for LED turn signals.

This is the one I’m thinking of.

http://www.customled.com/PRODUCTS/FLASHER_RELAY/flasher_relay.htm

$19 bucks is worth it to keep my turn signals.

Today after work I set up my tools outside, put the ipod on shuffle and started the process of removing the old handlebars. I jumped in and unbolted the front brake and master cylinder. Piece of cake.

Then I removed the electric starter control assembly. It had two screws at the bottom. Easy enough.

Slid off the grip. Easy, but what I didn’t realize was the wiring for the electric starter was strung through the bars. I guess I kinda knew, but wasn’t prepared for how I was going to take the wires out. Eh.. I just moved on to the other side.

The turn signal, horn, and clutch assembly. Three screws. Easy.

Went to work on removing the pilot lights. Four bolts. Easy.

The bars were then off. So I had two choices. I could de-solder the controls and string the wires through the bars, or I could open up the headlight and disconnect the wires from the main harness.

I disconnected the wires from the main harness in the headlight. I didn’t bother writing down where they went. Everything is color coded and it should be relatively simple to put them back where then need to be.

This wasn’t easy. The handlebars had two curves in them. Stringing the wires through was a bitch. I’ll never do that again.

Done.

Gonna ebay the old bars.

The front turn signals were fairly easy to remove… one simple nut to unscrew

But I had to disconnect the wires from the harness which meant taking apart the headlight.

Hard to believe they actually wired motorcycles this way. Kinda looks primitive in a way.

To remove the reflectors I just twisted counterclockwise.

It came right off very easily… but

This one on the right fork wouldn’t twist off. I had to break it.

I used pliers to twist if off.

The forks look much cleaner now.