Rewire

[mpinkorea]

Has anyone on this site rewired their bike form the front to the back and had sucess. Is there anything that I should be aware of when doing this. I have done some rewiring on cars before as is restoration. It seems as though the wire is all readily available. I think it would go soomthly as long as I have done before and label, label, label. Any input would be great.

[arveejay]

If you change wire colors future trouble shooting would be nearly impossible. Why not just buy a used harness on ebay if yours is bad?

[drhach]

Rewire

I may be facing this same issue. My wiring doesn't look too hot and I am skeptical that buying another 28 year old harness will be any better. My own two cents are that, if this becomes necessary I will need to do the following. First and foremost, I will need to make or modify the schematic to reflect the new wiring since buying all of those colored wires is way too cost prohibitive. Secondly, I will need to clearly label all of the wire that I do use.

A second alternative might be to selectively repair the existing harness in which case you can use the same color wires and just replace all of the connectos with new ones. I definitely plan to try that first. Like any wiring job, common sense and organization will be your friend.

[JHawkins]

Personally unless your doing it to make the bike a stocker, I would rethink the whole wiring plan for the bike. It could be made more robust, and less complex quite easily. I am lucky enough that for the most part wiring makes sense in my head so I don't have a problem rethinking some of the sillier parts (like no relays for the headlights and having long wires running the power to the headlight, and the whole stator power through the headlight switch thing).

[spchips]

I did mine, (79 gs100L) I happened to have a spare. I had a color diagram.

Don't do it from scratch, just go through the original 100%. It's not too hard. If a wire is spliced, fix it, change burnt connectors, ........ and so on. If you can get a spare you will have extra bits of all the right colors to solder in if necessary. You can also leave the original on the bike for reference while doing the new one. However, from my experience, looking at two 27 year old harnesses and expecting either to be completely original is a bad assumption, so be careful.

As mentioned, ditch the turn signal control BS. Also get rid of the extra wires you will likely find near the headlight. Did all bikes some with extra connections or just mine?

[bwringer]

I've usually found that the wires themselves are in fine shape, but that the connectors need to be replaced or I need to make direct soldered connections (like with stator wires.)

Unless it caught on fire or something, I don't think there's much need to toss the whole wiring harness. Just fix and upgrade the bits that need it, and remove the bits you don't need.

You can get wire assortments with lots of different colored spools very inexpensively. Striped wire is sort of hard to find, though. If you're really cheap, you can get wire labels and manually label where appropriate.

Another tactic is to get some heat shrink tubing in various colors, then cut small collars of heat shrink and put them on the ends of the wires before the connectors. You can create any combination of markers you want this way.

I know some custom builders wire everything with black wire in black heat shrink so it looks neater, so they have to label the wire ends clearly.

[mpinkorea]

I just picked up a factory original wiring harness from the same year bike. Holding it up to all of the connectors on the bike it appears the same in all ways. I think that I am going to use this as a reference and then if I need to change colors of the wires I will update my electrical schematic to reflect these color changes. Thanks for all of the input and I will let everyone know how it goes.

[POULSEN]

I did a complete rewiring of my 77' GS550.
First of all because POs had made "repairs" like shortcutting the only fuse in the system, but most off all because i wanted to improve the system like adding a master relay, permanent light (mandatory in Denmark) and a fusebox. I used cables with numbered wires and made a full documentation http://home20.inet.tele.dk/xxxxx/Ele...550_77_v10.pdf

If you decide to go by this path, the documentation is made in MS-PowerPoint. PM me if you want a copy to work from.

Whatever you choose, let us know the result of it. I made the rewiring last winter, and has been driving since than without any electrical problems.

Stig