wiring harness

[Sidk]

How easy is it to swap out a wiring harness?
my tiger is experiencing some electrical issue and im thinking of buying a used harness cleaning it up testing it etc.. and then replacing..

[Timbox2]

Im probably not the best to comment, my last attempt at re-wiring a vehicle resulted in a lot of smoke, and trying to source this stuff is tricky these days:

[London_Phil]

Is replacing a whole harness really a proportionate response?
What are these electrical issues?

[Sidk]

it was just a thought, so as to have some piece of mind.

yesterday out of the blue the bike died at a stop light. no lights  no turning over nothing.

was in a hurry so i left it there and came back a few hours later with a buddy and a booster thing to start it an a multimeter to check battery.

used the booster and bike started great. at idle the battety was at 12.5 and with throttle 14.7

so we let it get some juice and tried to get moving.
once the brake lever was pulled the bike died.

we did the booster start a few times same result when the front brake applied.

we unplugged the electrical bit from the brake lever and it worked fine.

all fuses ok no burnt ones. alternator is outputting.
limped the bike home put it on tender. bsttery is completely dead.

the easy thing would be to just replace the battety.. but i think there is more to it than that. so since i can get a wire harness here locally relatively cheap.. i thought why not get it, clean it up. test all the wiring and then swap out the old one, with the "refurbed and tested" one instrad of trying to find any issues on the installed harness..

[98TIGA]

That's interesting... I'm getting over 13V output at idle (approx. 950 RPM).

I'm inclined to think you've got some sort of short in your brake wiring. I'd try tracing it out before I'd go to the trouble of replacing the whole harness. Would also be curious to know what the current draw is on the bulb. Have you checked for burning or corrosion on the offending brake switch? High resistance could be the culprit.

[Sidk]

I will look into the wiring and switches, unfortunately these things happen to me at the worst times as work sent me last minute to the south of Spain, so barely had enough time to get the bike off the street before flying off..

when i get back ill due some poking around the wiring. and hope its something silly

[Lee337]

I replaced an entire wiring harness on a Ford Cortina based kit car I bought many years ago as there were electrical issues. It used to cut out intermittently.
Once replaced, the issue remained. After a lot of head scratching and a few more weeks of fettling, it turned out to be the earth strap between the alternator & the chassis, the only thing I didn't replace.

I know this is for a car & you're talking about a bike, but I could have saved myself time & money by checking the existing loom more thoroughly, rather than jumping to, in this case, the wrong conclusion.