97 VFR 750 tail light bother

working on the VFR. my 2nd after the last one was stolen. runs great. low miles. one problem:

dude i bought it from installed different tail light and turn signals. had to rewire the front right turn signal - she was blowing fuses. fine now. last night the front left turn signal starts crapping out. re-spliced the wiring and wrapped it - works great. soon as i get on to ride, my brake light won't disengage. take it slow to my girl's place making sure no one's behind to rear end or give me a ticket. splice and wrap the three wires (brown, green, black) to the tail light. now the brake light works when brakes are applied, but no tail light. black and brown? wires are for the tail light and ground and the green for the brake light. cleaned the ground, the bulb housing, bulb has two working filaments (when brake is applied, both light up) fuse is good to the tail light (which is on a different circuit). no luck.

any ideas?

 

Green=Ground (common)
Green/Yellow=brakes
Brown=tails/licence plate

I'll assume with the butcher job to your wiring, that the black is for the brake.
Good Luck
:crazy:

 

updated wiring bother

okay. upon reinspection - going upstairs and downstairs here - you're correct. brown=tail. green=ground. green/yellow=brake. from the wiring harness they switch respectively to yellow, black, and blue on the aftermarket light. black goes to a ground tab on the tail light housing. cleaned it thoroughly and reattached for a good ground. blue is obviously fine - brake light works. so i'm left with the yellow (brown) wire for the tail light. i've heard that the ignition switch can often be faulty so i followed TWO (2) solid brown wires from the ignition and they terminate in the front headlight fairing behind the instrument cluster. there is a six-bay coupling piece and the two bays where the brown wires terminate do not continue on the other side. there aren't even metal receptors (female) to continue the circuit on the other side of the coupling.

naturally, the tail light and brake light were working before, so i doubt this has anything to do with it. now, i have a basic knowledge of circuits, but i'm no expert. faulty wire somewhere in the harness?

sorry so wordy. thanks for your reply. hope this illuminates the problem...

 

Do the cluster and front marker lights work? If not, recheck the fuse. If the tail and licence lights aren't, but the brake and sigs are, then I would check the brown wire and the tail connector. They share a common grd. There should be 12V with the ignition on.

:crazy:

 

update II

wasn't a fuse, the cluster and indicators were fine. finally stopped guessing, went home and grabbed a circuit tester and found the circuit good all the way to the bulb contact. my initial estimation was that since both filaments were lighting up (although one looked a bit frazzled) when the brake was applied, it was simply bad wiring in the tail light circuit. guess the bulb just doesn't work the way i thought it did. hopefully a bulb replacement in the a.m. will solve the problem.

always learning.

thanks again for your help.