Thursday, October 11, 2007

It's Kind of a Heartbreaking Thing...


There I was at 5:30 this morning, the Harley sitting there idling... Warming up in the chilly early morning darkness. I was looking forward to riding to work this morning, knowing that the weather was going to be okay for it. I had my chaps on and had just put my jacket on when I happened to look out the garage at Harley sitting there in the driveway.

The tail light was out.

Dammit, and I had just replaced it the night before because one of the filaments (the bulbs have two filaments--One for brake and one for tail light) was burned out. Swearing under my breath, I grabbed a screwdriver and headed out there with a new bulb. When I got out there I noticed that the headlight was also out. WTF? I jiggled the high beam/low beam switch on the handlebars, and the headlight came on momentarily on the bright setting, only to go out in a quick flash of blue.

I know was that meant. When a bulb flashes once and looks bluish, that was its last gasp--It's toast.

Obviously there was more there than just a bad bulb, so I shut it off and rolled it back into the garage. I felt like a whipped puppy as I took my leathers off. At this point I didn't have time to dick around or I would have been late for work, so I didn't even have time to go upstairs and exchange my boots for shoes. As I got in my car and drove off, I felt momentarily happy that I had at least filled up the gas tank on it the night before. Something told me that even though I was planning on riding the bike I'd better fill it up anyway. At least that worked out.

Well, I troubleshooted the problem tonight after work. Both headlight filaments were burned out (weird!), and one tail light filament was burned out. I came back after going out and buying new bulbs, installed them, and was outside running the bike... Making sure everything was right. All the lights worked until I got to the foot brake. The hand brake lit the brake light up, but the foot brake didn't. When I started tracing the foot brake linkage back to find the switch that activated it, I found the source of the problem. One of the two wires on the switch had broken off the switch, leaving it bare and bouncing off anything near it. How do I know? I saw it spark when I touched it. I immediately shut the bike off so I wouldn't blow my new lights, and unplugged the broken part of the switch from the end of the wire so it wouldn't touch anything until I can buy a new switch for it after work tomorrow. I plan on riding it to work tomorrow, and the fact that I have no brake light when I hit the foot brake is moot. I always use both brakes when I stop, and if I'm using the hand brake the light will come on fine.

I have to wonder how long it's been like this because it has been going through an awful lot of tail lights in recent times...

I'm just lucky it didn't happen on the way to work this morning instead of the driveway. No lights at all is hard to work with when it's dark out...

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