Ten Minute Job

Gotta luv those ten minute jobs, had one today that lasted five hours. LOL Wiring up a trailer plug on a bagger, sounds easy doesn't it, especally since I had already worked on the bike and had pre-wired a pigtail down to where the plug was going to be. The only reason I didn't finish it when I was working on it the first time was that I didn't know how the customers trailer was wired. Normally on cars and trucks there is a set pattern as to how a light plug is wired, but knowing bikers the way I do, I didn't take it for granted that they had followed any set pattern. Since I wasn't sure about the wiring and the customer couldn't tell me either, I asked him to bring the trailer to the shop so that I could verify the wiring pattern. He dropped the trailer off late tuesday, so it was on my board to do today. It took me about five minutes to decipher the pattern. The pattern was fairly normal, the only goofy-ness was the wire colors on the trailer itself, they didn't run along standard color patterns, but it didn't really matter as long as the plug was ok. The fun came with the bike, I decided to test things before doing the final hard wiring, so I hooked the wires together and put a bit of black tape around each one to keep things from shorting. Then I grabbed my test light to check things out, running lights were fine, brake lights were fine, turn signals - a dead short, or at least that was my first guess. It defently acted just like a dead short, I could pull the main plug going to the rear of the bike and the turn signals would work ok, so I started with the easy stuff, I pulled all the light bulbs from the rear and started trying to isolate where the short was, couldn't find it, then I pulled the bags off and dropped the shocks so that I could get to the underside of the fender, no problems there. By now I've killed about two hours tracing wires, finally yelled at the boss to come over and put his two cents in, he fiddled for about twenty minutes before giving up and telling me that it's got to be in the wiring job I did putting in the pigtail and he wants me to cut it all out and then start over. After lunch we messed with it some more and finally decided it wasn't the wiring job it had to be the turn signal module. On older baggers this module is in the fairing - somewhere. Usually it's just behind the headlight, so all you should have to do is pull the headlight assembly out, needless to say it wasn't where it was supposed to be. Like I said, it's an older bike and has been worked on before. I ended up having to pull the front part of the fairing off, about twenty misc. bolts later I had it off and was digging through the wiring nightmare looking for the module, finally found it zip-tied to the back side of the fork leg, and of course it was the older style unit, spent about twenty minutes digging through the cabinets before I found another one, I've got a whole box of the new style on the shelf, we've pulled a lot of them rebuilding bikes. That turned out to be the problem, the module was failing, it had enough strength to work the bike's turn-signals, but it couldn't hack the additional ones on the trailer. Got to spent the rest of the afternoon rewiring all the wiring I cut out, then putting the bike back together. But it's all done now and ready for the road. You know this is the second time that turn signals have really messed with me, the first time was on my '76 750ss, I spend two weeks tracing a dead short in it, the sucker would blow the main fuse as soon as I turned on the key, that ended up being the turn signal flasher, turns out that the expensive honda flasher needs to be grounded, but the cheap replacement one doesn't, as soon as I pulled the ground wire off, everything was fine. Oh well, another lesson learned.