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#90920
I fitted a self-exciting, crank mounted ignition/charging system when I built my 612 bullet. I also built a custom wiring loom which was broadly based on the original late iron barrel loom but without the AC/DC lighting.

Out for a run this weekend and I noticed the ammeter initially a little in the green then dropped to central. It's only a tiny 2Ah battery and the lighting is all LED so I thought it was pretty much showing it was fully charged.

For some reason, I tried the lights when I stopped and they weren't working. A relatively small amount of fiddling showed the battery had come adrift and pulled one of the terminals off, the intermittant sparking as this happened must have also blown the main fuse.

Not a huge issue, the ignition self excites so the bike still runs so I thought I'd pick up a spare fuse at the next filling station. Hadn't gone far when I noticed the lights actually were working.

Why? Well obvious now I think on it, the generator feeds into the charging system on the opposite side of the ammeter to the battery but the fuse is next to the battery. It was happily running away powering the lights with the fuse blown. Good because I have lights. Bad because there's nothing preventing a short in the lighting causing an electrical fire.

This wouldn't be an issue on a standard bullet because as soon as the fuse blows, the engine would conk out and kill the power.

Easy fix. If you have a self-exciting ignition, you need two fuses. One each side of the ammeter. (or a single one "upstream" of the charging input but this leaves a lot of the always-on live wiring potentially unprotected).

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