Electrickery

The wiring provided with the bike was a right mess! The original loom had been left intact but then roughly cut into and hacked about to wire into the moto-gadget unit and non-standard switchgear.

I spent a happy hour or so in the shed trying to disentangle and understand the various different circuits. There weren't many block connectors, with most things being hard wired in. As I'm going to completely rewire the bike, I cut the loom down into sub-sections, clearly labelling everything so I knew how to reconstruct it.

I ended up with this rat's nest of redundant wiring, which went straight in the bin.

But more importantly, I also ended up with a clear set of components and a clearer understanding of how to rewire it all using the moto-gadget unit, when the time comes.

I also used a spare battery to check things like the horn and also how the wiring for the repeater lights in the speedo are wired up. Happily, all worked fine.

Some history.

When I bought the bike, the current owner gave me a copy of the previous owner’s registration document. I wrote to him a couple of weeks later to see whether he possibly still had any of the parts left that he’d removed when he modified the bike.

Yesterday, I got a really interesting email from him with some history of the bike. It turns out that he bought it in a pretty sad state, after it had been left to rot at the back of a garage for 17 years. Lots was missing from it and the wiring loom had been nibbled by rodents!

Seeing that condition, I understood why he had done the build in the way he had. Apparently, I have been quite wrong in describing it as a cafe racer - it's a "brat bike" (whatever that is!)

This was the bike when he finished his project:

He thought the mileage before he changed the speedo was around 35k miles. The compression was perfect, which was the deciding reason he rebuilt it. 

He said that it was in perfect running condition, after fitting new carbs from Italy and electronic ignition, and used to run really well.

The thing that I was most pleased about was that he sent me a link to a YouTube video of bike in former incarnation and that did indeed show it running really well, so I am very hopeful that the engine should need little doing to it.