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[Norm]

Can anybody explain to me the reason the orange wire from the stator is also connected to the frame (neg) further up in the loom. this is also the wire that goes to the headlight and is part of the engine running / headlight on system.I would like to make the headlight run off the battery but as the battery is small and mounted up inside the seat I'm not sure if it would be good enough. Makes this wiring so hard to test when you don't have a running motor in it. I have stripped the wiring completely because this bike is being built as a cafe racer and I'm trying to minimise the number of wires up in the headlight area. Any thoughts?

[grunda 12]

hi norm ,had a 350 bullet in the shed last week with burnt out stator on the lighting side so wired to battery direct disconected all non useful stuff ,also found that orange wire is to the frame ,must be an earth?anyway lights worked a treat off the battery ...but the high beam light was permanently lit on dip & main,my diesel bullet was wired exactly the same as its a 4 wire loom ,never had that problem i could only put the problem down to a short in the headlamp area so all will be revealed later this week.atb paul.

[Les H]

Hi Norm. As far as I can make out the orange wire might see an earth at the base connection of the headlight bulb. There is a fair chance that the bulb holder will be earthed via the reflector shell. Similarly the main beam warning light might be earthed on it's side connector of the bulb to the speedo shell. However if you are doing a DC lighting conversion, you will be ditching most of the existing AC lighting cct anyway. You just need to take the yellow wire (which will become the new DC live feed wire)and extend it back to the ammeter or battery depending on what you want to leave in the system. Just parallel up the charging coils and AC lighting coils with double bullet connectors at the end of the alternator leads, and run the single pair thus created to a voltage rect/regulator of your choice and take the output from this to the lighting switch and ignition switch. As you know, this has been described recently in reasonable detail. The orange wire in the modified DC conversion could be used as the new earth wire in the nacelle so don't have any reason to be testing it anyway..... In fact I would remove or tape up the orange and replace with a black wire on the headlight connector and use this for the earth.

[Les H]

BTW.....a bit of trivia for you Norm...The AC regulator is simply 2x back to back Zener Diodes. When the headlight is switched on the lighting switch also connects the yellow/red across the to the yellow on the alternator. In this way the output from the yellow and amber alternator coils is "clamped" "clipped" or "regulated" whatever term you prefer. But when the headlight is switched off so is the connection to the AC regulator. By having it switched in and out of the circuit, the power the AC reg has to handle is greatly reduced, because if it was always in circuit the AC reg would have to dissipate the entire AC output of the lighting coils if the headlight was switched off. As it is, the AC reg only has to limit the excess voltage rise at maximum revs which will be only a few watts of energy. However if the headlight bulb blows when switched the entire excess of power will need to go through the AC reg after the voltage has risen above the voltage limit (probably about 12.5 volts)so a broken headlight bulb could cause a failure of the AC regulator should it be left switched on.

[Les H]

For clarity when I said:.... "The orange wire in the modified DC conversion could be used as the new earth wire in the nacelle" .....I meant: "The orange wire in the modified DC conversion could be used as the new earth wire FOR THE HEADLIGHT BULB" in the nacelle etc. etc. ...I go on to suggest for wiring clarity the bulb earth wire would be better if it was Black rather than confuse by using the orange....your choice of course.

[Norm]

Thanks for that Les, ditched the orange and replaced with black for headlight earth, connected orange/purple and yellow/purple and waiting on a Boyer powerbox now. Everything works no problems and I got all the wires into the cafe headlight shell. Thanks again. Sorry Alan, I didn't work out an easy fix for converting these to headlight run off the battery because the 2 I have done in the last couple of weeks both ended up completely rewired which wasn't the original intention