Topic: Mmmm tasty melted wiring now with pictures!

[UnCrash]

  Sheesh,

I was beginning to doubt my 78 750F.  I mean -- I bought it without hearing it run, sitting outside for who knows how long, PO vented battery over electrics and many a wire's casing melted...

But at $400 I couldn't resist.  It started up and the PO delivered it to my house in the spring.  I've done various maintenance things; tires, brakes, timing, valves, carb synch, etc.  I pulled apart some of the nastiest wiring and carefully electrical taped up the links.

Bottom line though is this thing just ran.  Every tweak I made, it just ran better.  I feel like I'm breathing life back into her!  She's done the ton this summer and had more throttle left than I was willing to use and she felt rock solid doing it.

Some of you may have read my account of her dying on the highway two weeks ago --->  http://www.sohc4.us/forums/index.php?topic=24715.0  I've replaced the fuses but the bottom one gets pretty hot.  I've ridden the bike since then.  In fact I rode her last night with all the melted nastiness that you see.

This morning I get itchy to look into the problem before work and have a complete replacement harness and electric bits purchased off Ebay, so I dive in and am really surprised by what I find.

I now believe that these bikes are virtually bullet-proof.  Hell if it ran with wiring like this, I think it will run forever!

Here's the melted female side of the connector:



Here's the melted male side of it.  This was bound with packing tape as you see it, then that packing tape was wrapped with electrical tape (by the PO).


To the right is the part that this connector goes to.  What you see is the replacement one with the fresh and unmelted male connector.



Question:

Is it reasonable for a short term fix to clip the female connector off (on the left), solder the wiring off the current harness on the bike to the replacement female connector that I have. 

I would prefer to do something other than replace all the wiring with my new (used) harness...

Additionally I could just clip off the melted end and pinch on the flat female receptacles that I could buy from the hardware store....


---  Here is a pic of the bike.  I thought it was pretty ugly when I bought it.  Now I really like it, and can only imagine how I'll improve her.   I'm even liking the fairing, especially at highway speeds...



Any thoughts appreciated as always.

[jdigga]

I had the same problem with my bike.  I just cut off the whole connector and used individual bullet connectors to put it back together.  Not very elegant but it works.  I recently bought a replacement 6-pin connector that I was going to try to use for the ignition, but the little tab-lock bit is the wrong way, so I might just use to to reassemble that part of the harness properly.

[jdpas29]

a cheap way to try and isolate your grounding issue (which is what i did)..  is to remove/unplug  everything you can on the bike, rewire the harness down near the fuses and all and replug one item at a time and wait for smoke or excessive heat.

something as simple as the wrong light bulb can burn up fuses.  i had a bad ground on my horn that was blowing fuses and actually burned up my low beam in the headlight!!!  argh...

in any event you'll have to rewire, but i would hesitate to put a nice new harness or whatever on there until you know what's crossed up.  ghetto/macguyver rig the thing with correct connections and try what i stated above and see if you can isolate the problem.

love you mean it

[Bodi]

Those are just normal 1/4" spade connectors. If you get insulated females and strip the wire back to where it looks like shiny copper rather than black burnt copper you'll be fine. Better would be uninsulated connectors that are soldered on and then insulated with heat shrink. The "home" crimpers that are available don't do a really good crimp, the ratcheting industrial ones with 3 pins that push in together are really good but the squeeze flat crimpers are a bit unreliable. The plastic shell just makes it fairly impossible to connect the wires wrong, you do have to be very careful with individual wires.