12th Jul 2018, 21:54

Well my brother, there are two ways out! You can take it up to the Yamaha dealer and let them deal with it? At $100 an hour shop time? Or you could do it yourself? I don't know how mechanical you are, but the only thing that is a total pain in the butt about that motorcycle, is the two inside spark plugs are so tight that it literally takes about a half an hour or 20 minutes per spark plug to remove. Other than that, everything is accessible. Carbs are easy to take off and clean.

Regarding your electrical issue, if you've got 50k on the motorcycle, I would jump into the fuse box and replace the little relays that are in there; if you have the manual you can see which is which (there is a specific relay and a fuse that controls your headlights. The bottom line is that if you changed the light bulb, it's either a wire or the relay on the good side); otherwise you can probably find a manual online! The relay for your lights maybe after so many miles might perhaps have a floating short, and you should be able to pick those relays up for $40 to $60 a piece, and it's not going to do any harm to change them at this point anyway. I would start with that and then go from your fuse box and follow the lines up to see if anything got nicked somewhere? It's certainly not an impossible scenario that one of the wires for the headlights is a little stripped and arcing against something where it gives you your intermittent problem with your lighting. That would be part 1. But I would replace at this point, all the relays, because there is a shelf life believe it or not, and reading your comments made me feel good, because I just found another young fellow is selling that has 32 thousand miles on it, but that's only a thousand miles a year, and short of a couple of pieces of trim, it looks gorgeous, but I'm sure I'm going to run into the same things you are, so start there and see what happens.

Another little hint on the quick here; if you can't figure it out after you change the relay, either way you're going to want to follow that wire to the headlights right out of the fuse box to start with, so you can take a screwdriver or hex drive (I'm not sure what it is) and loosen the entire fuse box, pull it loose and then go underneath where the relays for your headlights are, and they should be separate, one for the front light, one for the rear tail light, and then you should have another relay for your blinkers (if I remember correctly). Loosen up the entire fuse box, pull it out and then take that wire underneath the relay forward to the front headlight, and follow it literally by hand all the way from the fuse box, right up through and to the headlight. There may be some plastic that they use to wrap around the set of wires that come out of the fuse box, and go through the frame and pop out where your cluster is (conceptually the reason for this is that the wires sometimes are running over parts of the motorcycle that get very hot so they don't want to melt the wires). They are zip tied to the frame or whatever else is around to keep the wires from resting on extremely hot engine parts. From the fuse box up to the cluster, that bunch of wires has to pass over the top of the heads (so don't be surprised if you see some weird looking black plastic wrap that has a joint running up and down it lengthwise). You might even be able to run a YouTube search where somebody is actually doing it so you can watch them yourself and save yourself a lot of shop money!). You can always later go back and go buy a bag of zip ties after you get everything squared away, and then just remember where they were and put all the wires back in. If you have to replace a wire, I would suggest using a nice wireman's twist (you can Google that if you don't know how to twist the wires that way; it's a very specific thing). Soldering it and then take a piece of heat shrink rubber (that you slide on and push back BEFORE you solder your joint), you can hit that with a hair dryer and it melts and makes a beautiful seal that will keep it perfect wet or dry. Your tach and your speedometer. That piece of plastic you can open up and peel off so that you can find that wire, and like I said, see if it's nicked anywhere? That would be my suggestion on that end. Don't forget my brother, as the relay for your lights, whether they are headlights, rear light or your blinkers, should be changed anyway at this point, and maybe what you're experiencing is the relay trying to tell you that it needs to be changed? How else would you know? And given the fact that they're not that expensive, it's a good thing either way, because at some point very soon they're all going to end up being toasted and you're going to have to replace them anyway - so there's some good aftermarket places online where you can get those relatively cheap; spend yourself $100 perhaps and change all your relays! Good luck with everything!

I would start with that!

FYI - I have built a few motorcycles from scratch, so give it a shot and it's really not rocket science, unless you take it to the dealership and they tell you that it is! LOL! At a hundred bucks an hour, they want to keep it there as long as they can...

Good luck my brother, ride safe, stay in the wind, and keep the rubber on the asphalt! Peace.