A Little Light Drama

No light is dramatic at night.

After the BTW meeting, Gabby rode the white thing to work, with me and Sponge Bob in escort. There were no (known) problems. When she got off work that night, she had no main headlight and the smaller "high beam" was dim and/or flickering. I did some quick field testing and decided that the bulb must have gone, as new stuff is sometimes likely to do. We used some wire ties and spit to get the smaller light to stay on and rode on home.

This evening, I chased down the troubles, and there were indeed two independent failures. Some NASA engineer is getting fired for this...

First, the main headlight, the new one. I'm the engineer getting canned for that one. I used a self-soldering heat shrink type of connector and maybe I didn't heat it enough or something. It didn't bond well and with it sinking current for two halogen filaments simultaneously, it heated up and came unsoldered. Ground open, no light.

The smaller high beam thing had a similar problem, but this one wasn't my fault. This light was operated by a small rocker switch mounted on a bracket on the left mirror bracket. Neither the wire nor the solder point on the rocker switch was adequate to power that light. One of the wires had come unsoldered from a switch terminal. The wire can't be any bigger than 20ga and the switch is probably good for 1A. For the short term, I connected the lead from the light directly to power in it's harness.

So, the white thing's headlights are semi-permanently wired to the keyswitch.

I have begun refurbishing the handle bar switches (and throttle) from a Suzuki something or other than the previous owner of Puff threw in. They fit one inch bars. I wire brushed all the paint and corrosion off the left one and painted it. I decoded the wiring and I will be ready to install it one evening this week. It will cover hi/lo, turn and horn. The right hand switch has a run/stop switch and a start button. Just this moment, those functions are covered elsewhere, but I'll still be interested in using them.

Tinker gave me a couple of screws for the cooling tins. I applied them both the cylinder tins. The 1-2 cylinder tin didn't have any screws at all. Neither did the doghouse.

Then I noticed a bigger problem. The righthand fuel tank bracket either lost it's bolt or never had one. There is a welded-on 3/8" nut on the frame bracket it bolts to and it had a lot of rust inside.

Anyway, I found 5/16" bolt and nut, manhandled the full 8 gallon tank into position and bolted it down. Someday, I will replace the 1/4" x 1" flat straps with 1" angle or maybe 1" square tubing. Either would be way more rigid and better suited to holding up 48 pounds of gasoline.