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Removing/fixing gear indicator switch (sender)

  • Thread starter Thread starter 79-GS550-L
  • Start date Start date
7

79-GS550-L

Guest
Hello everyone,

I just bought a '79 GS550 yesterday. For my first repair job, I want to fix the gear lights. It has 6 lights, plus a separate neutral. Neutral works fine, as do 2-6. But there is no ground signal for 1 coming through the harness. I figure the switch contacts are dirty. So I removed the sprocket cover and I see a bundle of wires coming down from above into a round thing. It looks like it is a small cylinder that was filled with epoxy (I can see the wires disappearing into it). There was a screw on either side. I removed the screws, but the thing won't budge (I tried tapping it with a hammer, and prying it gently). Any ideas how to get this out? I'm wondering if the epoxy was added in by a previous owner, since I haven't heard that in anyone's description of the piece. Do I need to chip out the epoxy to see if there are any screws in there? Is this even the right part?

I've attached a picture of the part. It was all blackened, but after scraping away the grease you can see that hard orangey glue stuff the wires go into.

Thanks,
Alex
 
Does your bike have six individual lights for the gears, or one of those digital indicators?

If it has six lights, the bulb for #1 might be burned out. Try swapping it with another posititon to see if it works.
It might be the bulb, not the sending unit.


.
 
Ok I fixed it. I do have 6 individual lights, I tested and all bulbs worked fine. The sender took a surprising amount of prying to pop off (prying from the top worked best) - I think it just had a lot of old grease caked onto it. The orange stuff was indeed some sort of glue, covering a terrible soldering job. I had to dremel away the glue from the wires carefully. Oil had seeped into the solder connection through little pores in the glue, and had forced the wire & contact apart for the 1st gear contact. I resoldered, reglued, and now all 6 gear lights work.
 
Digital indicator on a 1978 GS 750

Digital indicator on a 1978 GS 750

After doing the Electrex upgrade, my digital display would sometimes light all seven segments, or sometimes just looked like gibberish. I figured that by regulating all three phases, a raw voltage was now lower due to regulation. It looks on the wiring diagram that the shift lever has a switch that must feed a 1 of 8 decoder for the seven-segment, and maybe after 29 years, the regulator or a filter cap is marginal with the lower voltage. I've been meaning to take the display out and troubleshoot, but it has been a low priority. Anybody ever dig into this type of display?
 
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