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jeff006 26/01/2012
Spent today traversing flooded roads across the Gold Coast helping friends with leaking roofs & waterlogged cars, & rushing home to drain water from our pool 3 times in just 24 hours to prevent serious flooding. I am told this is the most sustained downpour ever recorded. It is almost exactly one year since a horrifying flood swept through Toowoomba and decimated the Lockyer Valley. I grew up In Toowoomba. This can be a harsh land sometimes. A LOT of BBQs won’t be happening tomorrow.
Once home there was no leaving & nothing for it but to do some tinkering! An interesting & unexpected project found me, involving two seemingly unrelated subjects: the electrical system of a bike, & the legal requirements for mudflaps and reflectors at the tail-end of motorcycles. Before you ask, yes I must be quite mad.
I had been unable to ride my Ducati for a week & wanted to turn it over. The first thing I noticed is that NO LIGHTS CAME ON! The loss of both lights suggested a problem other than just a blown bulb. More strangely, the high-beam DID work but only when used by the temporary/flicker switch rather than the permanent high-beam switch. Weird, and, my friends, I am NO auto-electrician. Well, I wasn’t, until tonight.
After a useless half-hour tracing wires around I resorted to the manual. “Electrical system”, p78. So I check the fuses one by one and find a blown fuse! YAY! And (thank you Ducati, see photo) the fuse-box contains two spare fuses. The head-lamp comes on, but no tail-lamp. The tail lamp was also not responding to front or rear brake. It was dead. So I pull the rear tail-light assembly apart to find the bulb broken off its metal bayonet base & floating loose in the casing! I also notice there’s some evidence of paint worn where the tail light has been vibrating against the bottom of the seat. All becomes clear!
Long ago I had “tidied up” my tail end! Unfortunately, I had tucked the tail-lamp so nicely behind the rear seat that the vibration of the L-Twin Ducati engine had battered the lamp senseless against the seat!
I had a bit of work to do, so I also addressed another issue that had recently been pointed out to me. It seems that there are a confusing array of regulations about how far the end of the tail assembly must protrude over the rear wheel. Bizarrely, my fellow Ducatistas had told me the week before that “the law” is that the end of the tail assembly (even if it's just the reflector) should be “at an angle of 45 degrees or less from the centre of the wheel (i.e. the rear axle)”. Sounds like UTTER rubbish, but I needed to make a reflector. See the result of genuine makeshift engineering!
See side profiles. Ducati meets the rule but Aprilia doesn’t, even with a long, useless, flimsy, ugly stalk for the reflector (which is no protection from anything)! And that’s the way it came straight out of the shop! These blogs are about getting people involved, so let me/us know what you think. It might seem boring, but it’s really just about getting greasy & having fun, working something out for myself! Just finding that blown fuse myself made my night!
