Monday, August 11, 2014

Gremlins

Yesterday in the desert heat, Donna noticed a problem with the display on her dashboard. She lost the clock / odometer and got some weird petroglyphs. As we got near Las Vegas, she noticed that her turn signals were also not working, and when I did a walkaround I saw no brakelight. The good news was, this was not a problem with the repair I made before we left with the shorted wire from the tire change. I figured it was simply a fuse, and we just had her be careful. When we got near town, Donna advised me that I had no brake light, either. Everything else seemed to work. Talk about "checking your six..."

After we got the bikes in the parking garage and our asses in the A/C for a half hour, I went down with the tools to start checking fuses. When I pulled the "lights" fuse out of her bike, it was fine. Uh-oh. I pulled another, and another, and all were fine. Uh-oh. At that point I had no idea what to do, so I figured I'd check every one of them. About 3 fuses later, I found the one that was blown ( I forget how it was labeled, but you'd never have known it was the turn signals and brakelight.) Since I carry spares, that problem was solved. On to my bike, which was only a single problem and was assumed to be the bulb itself. I pulled it, too, and it looked like one of the filaments was bad. Time to find an Auto Zone.

The other thing was that the switch for my decorative LED lights (you don't want to know how much we spent on these) went bad back in Missouri. The whole plan was to ride down the strip brilliant with green and amber lights, and Donna's cool multicolored effects. I also had the tools to bypass the bad switch and operate them strictly from the remote control, so I pulled the fuse for that to prevent a short circuit while I worked on it, and I performed my surgery. Now here's the weirdness: I connected everything back up, and the lights went on BEFORE I put the fuse back in. Now I'm no dummy and I wired these myself, and I can tell you this should NEVER happen. I put the fuse back in anyway, gave it a "WTF" and a shrug, and moved on.

Then, on the way to the parts store in the morning, the brakelight started working.

THEN, when we went out that night to take our cruise, Donna's remote turned on MY lights. And so did mine. So, either one of us could now turn mine on or off, and nobody could turn hers on. They worked the day before at the dealer in Kingman.

THEN, I saw that the ones that I was afraid of being crushed at the dealership when they put the bike up on a lift still worked fine. But at least half the others were out.

Whatever.

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