1980 gs450 project, oh boy

[MLow]

Kitted puch maxi and tomos arrow. Tomos is mostly stock with expansion chamber exhaust. Man the tires on the peds are easy to change in comparison lol.

Thanks for the compliments. I hope the legal situation turns out smooth, thanks for turning me onto the Vermont thing I'll let you know how it goes.

[jeffasaurus2]

Cool beans, those things are fun, mine was pretty temperamental but a blast around the city. Interested to hear how the title works out, hopefully smooth sailing!

[MLow]

Yeah that's the plan but we will see. Wonder if there's any workarounds if it doesn't, really want to ride. Suppose around the neighborhood wouldn't hurt...

[MLow]

Cleaned the hand control out with isopropyl alcohol and compressed air, reassembled, same issue.. Bright low beam, dim high beam. I'll edit in some pics to show what it looks like...

[MLow]

Vermont mailed me back everything. Wrong fee.. they want $8 more for tax lol. Sending it out again now. Wont see the plate for a week at least ugh.

[MLow]

Another pic showing my slack wires. How can I get that stuff more organized?



And some pics showing the dim high beam problem I still can't solve.

LOW beam.


HIGH beam.

I took those pics with very low exposure to show the dramatic difference. The low beam illuminates well rode around in the dark and could see well. It's aim and shape are right on. The high beam however is only shaped the right way, hard to tell from pic, it has the correct shape in that it illuminates a higher angle up but the brightness is much less. Pretty much useless.

Any ideas? I swapped bulbs with a known good one off my ninja, I cleaned the switch contacts, I checked the wiring was good. I even reversed the wires and wired the low beam to high and vise-versa with no effect.

Is there just something odd going on here and I need to do relays?

[pete]

There's a bunch of wiring normally tucked into the headlight bucket... ugly but how they do it from the factory. Unless you plan on doing something a little more fancy like shortening the loom up there then that's about the only thing you can do. Aside from cable ties etc. of course.

As for your high beam, definitely weird.

Which switch contacts have you cleaned? On mine, the headlight switch is on the right control, the high beam switch is a part of the indicator switch on the left control. If you haven't cleaned both of those up, go to it... only thing I can think of right now...

[MLow]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vehicle-H4-9...p2054897.l4275

Look like a good price, but I have to wonder about the quality of the relays...

Should be good enough to try, and if the relays are bad/go out the sockets/wires they come with should let me just plug in a higher quality relay.

What do you think?

I'm thinking that the switches I got for whatever reason are not good enough for the high beam wattage but ok for the lower watt low beam.

The other thing I'm thinking about doing is using LED's for the indicator lights. Highbeam, oil, neutral, and turn. I'm missing 2 of the bulb holders and their wiring. So I figured I may as well make a little set of led's with resistors to work at the 12-15v that the R/R runs at.

I think that the R/R is close to going because it puts out pretty high 15v. But not over what the service manual says is acceptable. At 5000rpm it's like 15.25v. Which seems high but that's what the manual says is close to normal and not over what is suppose to be replaced.

I haven't checked for the stator output. I'm not sure what the normal range for that is.

I'm thinking I might put the license plate vertical off of the axle or something.
With a mount plate like this.


Looks like this.


Maybe not, because it might **** off local LEO's. But just a thought. Since the Texas law says plate must be readable from 200ft. They might get me for not having a light on it, or it being too hard to read from 200ft. I need to get a sheet of steel to make a "fender" under the seat to protect the airbox and electronics. Might as well use the rest of the steel to fashion a license plate mount.

[pete]

They should be ok I think. My stock switches are fine running my H4 bulb though...

I dunno how your laws work over there but here you really need it at the back and illuminated to avoid any issues.

[MLow]

Yeah your probably right. I see the a lot here though.

As for the switches, the only ones I could find were off a year later model. Maybe that model came with relays? The wires are heavy gauge though.

[jeffasaurus2]

Maybe already covered but have you tried cleaning all the contacts in the switches yet? I've used the aerosol spray from auto stores for contact cleaning and its done a pretty good job of removing buildup. Maybe something to try?

[MLow]

Yeah the problem I think is cause it's an 80 and the switches are from later year. So I think they used relays in later years not sure.

Those switch contacts have never been cleaner I swear. Alcohol(isopropyl), cotton swabs, and compressed air saw to that.

[MLow]

Wow ok so I lost a huge post. Probably for the better I just rambled anyways.

I got my vermon plate and registration in the mail. Waiting for the real registration tag, they just sent a temp tag and paper for now promising my real one will follow in a matter of 1-2 days. Took a week from my proper submission. First one was the wrong tax amount.(go figure)

I fixed my headlamp. I wired the connector wrong. It really doesn't matter how you wire it if you want light to come out, not for long though haha. Wire it right and it happily puts out tons of light. It even switched from low to high properly. Imagine that, all I had to do was wire it right...

It just needs a bracket to mount the plate on to, and an inspection sticker.

I don't know what I'm doing here so I'm going to go to a trusted bike guy who does inspections and see what happens. I scoured the Texas Traffic Codes so I know the basics I think. But it's all in the air with a project bike I guess, just gotta see what they find.

[Zahg]

Awesome, glad to hear Vermont is still doing this...I just mailed mine out on Monday. :-p
Not sure if you can get it inspected with out of state plates, think I read that you can only get a ticket for no inspection in the state the bike is registered anyways...Don't quote me on that though, I'm not 100% sure. Call and ask first I guess.

[MLow]

Awesome, glad to hear Vermont is still doing this...I just mailed mine out on Monday. :-p
Not sure if you can get it inspected with out of state plates, think I read that you can only get a ticket for no inspection in the state the bike is registered anyways...Don't quote me on that though, I'm not 100% sure. Call and ask first I guess.

Called and asked, your welcome .

Told him it was out of state and he said on top of the inspection sticker they give you a special form filled out to take to the dmv for your in-state registration.

So yes you will spend a chunk of change, double dip on the tax.

Called the tax office, she said bring insurance, id, registration, and special form from inspection. That gets your in-state plate and registration...for a fee but of course. Grand total $170 from what I can tell. $640 nada price but Texas don't care, she said $90 flat fee from out of state. From there I'm assuming it's a simple fee away from a title. I don't know I haven't gotten that far. I'm still trying to get it in shape for inspection.

Bad news though, one of the 3 bolts holding on the rear combo light snapped, deep in the rear combo light. Going to look at the parts fische to see what can be done about it. I was this close....