Thursday, May 2, 2013

Rewiring The Wonder Shovel

     Idle hands do the Devil's work. Nick has had a little time to burn and to keep his head and hands busy, he's been trying to take the shovel where he wants it. In stripping things down, he realized there was a bunch of excess wiring, fuses and relays that needed gone. It was getting later in the afternoon so we moved from one shovel to the other.
   
    
 



After doing most of the reassembly on the top end, we proceeded on with several spools of colored wire and a couple pairs of snippers. I grabbed a simple wiring diagram from the excellent roadratroberts.com.If this site looks a bit dated by current standards, it is probably because it hasn't changed much since I first stumbled upon in in 2003. Anyhow, from B-movie reviews to killer old school photos to the rad drawn out photo wiring diagrams, this site is worth a look. The first time I saw wiring diagrams like this was here. 





   
      So we stripped off wires as we went and used the old pieces to judge the length we would need for the new pieces. One by one we made the new wires, added connectors as needed and put it all together. We tried to use some sort of consistency in the colors and Nick had done a good job of marking things when he did his initial tear-down. Cold beers in a hot garage on a Saturday night is a pretty great thing. It was getting late and somehow the idea of twisted yellow and blue wiring held together with green zip ties was too good to pass up. We're dumb and we laughed really hard about it.
     In the end, we hooked it up to the battery and an old switch I had lying around and held our breath. Low and behold, the headlight and tail light lit up and nothing caught on fire! The brake light even worked and everything. Nick was pretty excited as that hadn't been the case in quite some time. As the motor is still apart, we didn't get the satisfaction of hearing it run again but we made some solid advances in just half a day and barring other issues (fingers crossed) the bike should live again sooner than later.


2 comments:

  1. That wiring schematic is not complicated enough. you should ad more lines and more colors.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Haha, right?
    I wish every bike's wiring was as simple as this...

    ReplyDelete

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