Harness Nightmare

[Nessism]

Dreading the electrical work on my 1000S restoration because the PO was into the harness changing things around. Cursory look reveled a switch to turn off the tail lights and a misrouted harness that was pinched at the fuel tank in front. Closer study reviled the harness was butchered to allow use of a manual LH control instead of the self canceling type, a separate Regulator and Rectifier instead of the proper combined R/R, all kinds of splices and wadded up piles of extra wire, etc. Honestly, I think this thing is a total loss. My guess is that the PO took a '79 harness and grafted in various pieces to make it work with the S.

I have a nice 1000G harness that I was trying to sell but now it looks like I'm going to have to use it. First thought is to pull the old butchered harness all apart and remove the sections unique to the S model. The gauge cluster is in pretty weak shape although I'd like to eventually figure out how to get all the gauges working.

Anyone else out there have experience with grafting a different model harness to fit into your bike? Figure the main function of the harness is pretty standard anyway so it should be mostly a matter of modding it with the extra S model accessories. Any words of advice?

[TheCafeKid]

I had to graft in connectors from an 80-82 harness into my 77 750 harness. Its not overly tough, the trick is to basicly make yourself a NEW colour coding chart. So YOU know what goes to what. It was really just a matter of matching up where on the connector goes to where, and then popping the pins out and moving them where they need to be.

[Texas Don]

Actually, I did this on a 1986 Voyager that I restored and added cruise control to. I set up a couple of saw horses and laid a half sheet of 2' x 8' plywood on them. Then I just inserted drywall screws into the plywood at various points to loosely cable tie the wiring harness to. At that point, you just unwrap all of the tape from the harness and you then have every single wire laid out and can see where it connects. You remove the butchered wires and replace them with new ones of the same color. I went to an automotive electric shop to purchase 18ga. wire in small quantities of 25' or less in the colors that I needed. Connectors are available from a number of sources (I used www.vintageconnections.com) and replaced all of the butchered, overheated, discolored and missing ones.
I used a simple spreadsheet to keep track of connectors to insure that I had everything accounted for. Then just rewrap the harness with 3M electrical tape and put it on the bike. I nailed mine the first time so it can't be that difficult. I'm going to have to do the same thing this winter to the Zuke I bought in June. The PO must have been kin to Paul Bunyan the way he chopped this wiring harness up.
Don

[Nessism]

Spent some time this weekend coming up the learning curve regarding GS electrical systems. The good news is that Suzuki maintained consistency between the GS1000E/S and GS1000G harnesses in terms of wire color for the various circuits; I traced a bunch of different wires but in the end learned that the color codes can be trusted for the most part. The harnesses are actually very similar so the conversion from G harness to S is going smoothly. Most difficult thing has been converting the harness to accept a 9-pin plug for the S IP cluster since the G cluster has a 6-pin plug. There are also minor differences such as different plugs for the coils; the early coils use bullet plugs but the later models use a 2 pin molex connectors. There are also differences between the turn signal control units and the ignitors - the ignitors interchange but not sure about the turn signal control units.

Overall, no huge big deal like I thought it would be.

[hikermikem]

Hey Ed, glad it sounds like an easier job than you anticipated...

Perhaps if you run a new stand alone 12V coil wire, along with the coil relay mod you can just cut in some more reliable spade connectors in lieu of those molex ones.