Electrical 101

I managed to get some time this weekend to work on things and being the aggressive/impatient type I was curious to know if I bought a motorcycle or just 400 lbs of dead steel. I took the old battery to the battery store knowing that it was probably not up to the task and got confirmation from the guy who said it was pulling a mere 2 volts. Getting $10 was too much to pass up so I got a new sealed battery and a tender/charger which has nearly doubled my investment. (see the tally page for details). I got back to the house, hooked it up and much to my surprise the headlight lit up and the high/low switch even works! The bike doesn't turn over, though, so I got the manual out and after some debugging feel fairly confident that it is the starter relay, as pictured here:

I labelled all the loose wires with painter's tape since you never know when this will resume and then ordered a new one online for $35.95 + shipping. Should be here in a week or so. Hopefully I don't have to replace everything electrical because at this rate it will take $5000 and the next decade to get this thing done (while the current value of a good version of this bike is worth maybe $1k at best, see this).

On the bright side, at least there was a general functioning of the electrical system and as a bonus I got the new ignition switch installed. It may the only new and clean part on the whole deal currently.

Overall the swap out was pretty easy. Two bolts hold the headlight to the collars on the forks so once one was removed it swung out of the way (sadly dropping the nut into the headlight bowl). After that there were just a couple bolts with hex heads holding the ignition switch itself onto the top of the triple tree. In order to get the dropped nut out I unscrewed the 3 retaining screws and pulled the light out, revealing a bunch of nastified cob webs but nothing too terrible. Since the kids were napping I just left it and have not vacuumed out yet. I figure it isn't worth putting back together until I know the electrical stuff is all in order but will probably clean it out at some point.

That was it for the weekend. If I'm lucky the replacement starter relay will be here is time for next weekend but I'm not that hopeful that it will be since I ordered late on a Sunday and they said 5 - 7 days shipping.