electrical conundrum

docw1

Bill Rankin
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Joined
Dec 3, 2004
Messages
1,467
Location
Muscatine, IA
Bike
2012 ST1300A
Wonder if any of you electrical gurus can piont me in the right direction. After I replaced my Garmin with an Apple Car Play unit, I decided to tackle my intermittent grip heater problem. I found some areas of the wiring/connectors that seemed extremely touchy, turning the unit off with just a minor jostle. Although I couldn't see anything wrong with the connections, I took the connectors off and recrimped and reconnected them. It won't turn on now. Then I found a strange effect: a couple of my accessories--fork lights and volt meter would not turn off when the key was turned to off. They are powered through a relay, triggered by a lead from the red/black wire on the clear connector of the quad connector. They have been wired like this for several years/miles without problem until now. What would cause power through that lead with the ignition off?
Thanks.
 
Wonder if any of you electrical gurus can pint me in the right direction.
After a pint or few this will seem like much less of a problem.

Otherwise maybe recheck to see all the connectors were reconnected where they should be. In the case of male-female connecters test to be sure every pair of pins is conducting. Maybe check any green ground wires are also properly connected. Just making sure that jostling the wiring didn't cause any damage elsewhere. That's all I got from the non-guru gallery.
 
Then I found a strange effect: a couple of my accessories--fork lights and volt meter would not turn off when the key was turned to off.
This sounds like a poor ground problem. Check the green ground wires and connectors at the white 24 pin harness connector under the left cowling above the cylinder head area and yellow buss above and behind the right hand headlight.
 
Ahh electrical gremlins...

Sounds like there's more than one issue here, which may or may not be related.

Lets look at the lights staying on via the relay issue.

Ground issues can do funny things, like back feed power, so as mentioned above check those.

1. did you recrimp / remove & replace any wires that connect to the relay, either at the relay or the other end of the wire? If yes, they might be on the wrong prongs.

2. relays can fail and stick open without trigger power. You can test by removing the positive trigger wire or the ground.
This assumes you're using a 4 pin relay and not a 5 pin relay.
If it's a 5 pin, and you removed & replaced wires you may have mixed the normal open and normal closed pins.
 
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