Speedo Light Comes On When Foot Brake Pressed

[Guest]

I own a GS550 1977 model. When I press the foot brake or front brake lever the speedo and tacho lights come on. Is this normal. If not can anyone give me an idea of what might be the problem. I have only had the bike a couple of months.

Regards
Don

[walt]

Your bike has some wires incorrectly hooked up. Inside the headlight shell is my guess as to where.

[tfb]

Either that or a short between the panel light and the brake light circuits.

[Suzuki_Don]

OK. Thanks guys. Another thing I noticed was (and this will be for the electrical experts among you, with OHMS Law experience) this problem only exists when the headlight is unplugged from the wiring loom. When the 3 pin connector is attached to the headlight the problem goes away. Does not happen. Hope this helps.

Regards
Don

[t3rmin]

I think the best solution would be to just ride around with your foot on the brake. Much easier!

[Suzuki_Don]

For those of you who are interested I have finally tracked down the problem and come up with the solution to remedy it. When the previous owner had fitted a different tail light on the bike he hooked up the wiring incorrectly in the back cowling over the rear guard. He had connected up the black/white earth wire from the loom to the stop light filament wire going to the tail light and the white (live 12V) wire coming from the stop light switch was going to the earth wire that went to the tail light. So the parking light had no earth and you can work the rest out for yourselves.
The problem has now disappeared with the correct wires now attached to each other.
Thanks to everyone for their advice and especially to MR DUANAGE (Duane) for supplying the Honda rectifier that has solved my charging woes. He sells modified ones for Suzukis if you ever need one.
Regards
Don

[Pharkmeh]

and here I thought your bike was telling you... ffs get the hell off the brakes cant you see how slow we're going now


glad u got it sorted....:-D

[Steve]

General rule of thumb that makes some of us look like "experts":

If it's doing strange stuff ... it's a bad ground. :shock:

Then the hard part is finding where. Congrats on finding yours. \\/


.

[Dave8338]

General rule of thumb that makes some of us look like "experts":

If it's doing strange stuff ... it's a bad ground. :shock:

Then the hard part is finding where. Congrats on finding yours. \\/


.

Truer words seldom spoken. [-o<

[SPARKSS]

FWhen the previous owner had fitted a different tail light on the bike he hooked up the wiring incorrectly in the back cowling over the rear guard.
Don

Good piece of troubleshooting Don! One of the real bugs to fixing equipment in my opinion is when that equipment is modified (like yours), and, based on your knowledge and information as to how it was originally supposed to work, the initial testing doesn't make sense - which means that at some point you have to reverse engineer the circuit/system - time consuming stuff!

[Suzuki_Don]

In the end Steve I eliminated various sections of the wiring harness by unplugging vatious connectors and seeing if the symptoms still existed. When I unplugged the connector to the rear tail light the symptoms did disappear, so I then had localsed the problem and then it was a matter of tracing each of the three wires the the tail light and see what the issue was.

Cheers
Don