I like the electrical work of tinkering with motorcycles. While I was a carpenter all my life, I did work as an electrician as well. Always fascinated by the stuff. Motorcycles have long had common wiring system problems, and the most common is poor grounding (earthing). A few years ago I traded my GL18 for an FJR1300 and moved into the FJR Owners forum, where I was astonished to find that many earlier models had major electrical system failures owing to what is commonly called the "ground spiders". Yamaha used gang connectors in several locations, mostly inside the fairing, to collect all the local grounds and hook them up to the main harness ground. Yeah, but the parts were too light for the loads and some of these connectors melted down, turning the bike into an inert block of aluminum with odd lighting here and there. Some of the photos shown on the forum were practically horrifying. This isn't quite the same as the Gold Wing alternator issues but does share a couple of points. Back in the bad old days, things were even worse. There were a number of bikes that were built with no ground wiring to the headlight/instrument cluster: they used the steering head bearings to take the ground current. Good grief. My first "big" bike was a BSA Royal Star twin. Despite my considerable youthful ignorance, I somehow managed to avoid any electrical problems, even with having added some extra lighting. Actually, that may have been my inadvertent fix, the extra wires augmenting the harness. Then again, my '67 was among the first with the miraculous Zener diode regulator, correctly mounted under the steering head in the full blast of the headwind. Combine those two separate paths, houses and bikes, and a lesson often learned is: make sure the grounding is good. On my FJR, a whole separate ground wire of large gauge runs forward to the zone where the most troublesome of the spiders are, and adds a lot of copper to the circuit. The spiders are pretty much absolved of carrying any large current. On the recently-acquired '03 6th gen VFR, I could see that my various accessories would want a similar solution. I established the cowl brace bolt to the frame as the collection point and gave every item its own return, which then heads back to the fuseblock/relay/battery via some 12/3 SJOW. That's a semi-heavy duty outdoor rated oil-resistant extension cord, which you can buy by the foot at a home center. 12 is the wire gauge, 3 is the number of conductors. 16/4 is something I also commonly use on bikes. It's tough stuff that won't wear through. So here's a picture of this gang ground in the upper right hand portion of the frame. The dangling spade connectors are from the USB port/voltmeter mounted in the fairing, removed for maintenance today. Heated grips, a Stebel horn, the USB thing, and my Garmin power are all fed here. The fuse system, incidentally, is a Fuzeblock brand one, which has a power relay built in and some very clever and convenient terminals for both switched-power and constant-power. Not cheap, but very nice. Saves some good time over my usual home-built relay+fuse block outfit. Note: some of the wiring you see isn't mine; it came with the bike. It's still a work in progress.
