Overview of Motorcycle Electrical Systems

Hello everyone. And welcome to Fix My Hog electricity. I'm Bob LaRosa and with me as usual is Mark. What we have here is a plethora of motorcycles each with their own generation of electronics and wiring. As you can see on the 2007 FL, there are radios, there are satellite reception antennas, there are automatic garage door opener modules. You can see the harnesses have become quite large and you need to use your manual anytime you're doing any testing or troubleshooting, whether it's on an 07 or on a 1974 FL. The wiring harness, the ignition system and the entire harness is greatly reduced in size and number of wires compared to the newer generations of motorcycles. Reason for this, this motorcycle doesn't have the accessories that are available on the newer motorcycles. This particular motorcycle had what we would consider a catastrophic electrical harness failure. What that means is that the main power wire that leads directly from the battery and what should have been a main circuit breaker, which provides circuit protection, someone eliminated the breaker and just put the wire directly to the battery. So when you wound up with a dead short or a grounded circuit, it just fused the wire from the power source, the battery, directly to the ignition switch. During the duration of this film, I'm gonna have Mark rewire what is damaged, troubleshoot what's not damaged to make sure ohms resistance isn't too high and try to get this harness back in condition, get this motorcycle ready for the street. .