Previous Owner bypassed the R/R with one Stator Wire?

[Guest]

Hey everyone. First off, I'm riding a 1981 GS550T. I've been chasing down a charging issue that sprung up. Stator was only putting out 9 volts, so i replaced that. Bike was still only seeing 11.5 volts across the battery when running. Replaced the R/R, and now we're right where we want to be. One (maybe) big question though. The previous owner bypassed the R/R with one of the Stator wires it seems. Is there some sort of relay/bypass mod that he did that I'm not aware of?
The stator wire in question seemed to run into a white/green wire which tucks into the harness with the ride wire. The White/Red wire on the old stator is then bumped into another wire inside of the harness. I'll try and get better photos, but I'm dead colorblind, so any help is appreciated. The new R/R is hooked up as it should be, but now I've got these two extra wires where the Previous owner did something, and I'm not sure where to go from here.
Thanks in advance for your wisdom!

[knitt31]

A better photo of the wires that are now cut. The white/red wire was hooked up the the whire/red R/R input. The other wire was hooked up to one of the Stator output wires. Where do they go??

[posplayr]

You can safely ignore those wires. They are now spare. You can read about it in GS Charging Health. The OEM harness ran a stator leg to a ganged switch that disconnected one stator leg when the headlamp was off. In the US this is worthless as by law the headlamps need to be on all the time and the switch is not functional. However, to save on production costs of the harness, all of the wires and connections were left in the harness. They get hot and melt. Once your stator wires were wired direct to the R/R these wires become superfluous. In fact I repurposed mine for the coil relay mod.

[Steve]

You don't need to worry about them, they are the infamous "stator loop to the headlight switch".

In the original configuration (before '79), when the bikes had switches that would turn off the headlight, there were two sets of contacts in the headlight switch. One of them would control power to the headlight, the other one would interrupt current on one leg of the stator. That would keep the regulator from working so hard to control all the excess current/voltage that would be produced and not used.

When the headlight switches were disabled (then removed), the main wiring harness did not change, because other world markets still had them. Depending on your bike, you will find a connector either under the tank or in the headlight bucket where you will see the white/green wire loop on the back side of a connector over to a white/red wire and head back down to the R/R. Since there are so many extra connections and possibilities for corrosion, we recommend connectintg the three stator wires directly to the three R/R input wires, bypassing that loop. Looks like your PO already did that for you.

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[knitt31]

Thanks for the quick response you guys. I checked over the wiring diagram and had a feeling that they were the "Infamous headlight loop", but I wasn't quite sure what to do with them. The previous owner had at some point replaced the R/R and wired it back in to factory spec. I have now bypassed the loop and wired the Stator-R/R in correctly. Tackling shims tomorrow for the first time. Thanks guys!

[Steve]

Tackling shims tomorrow for the first time.

Feel free to take advantage of the invitation in my sig.

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