I've finally finished working on my friends '83 VT600C Shadow.

It's been sitting in my garage for the past 5 weeks with the forks apart. It's a new bike for him, his first. I replaced the tires, the fork seals (had to wait 3 weeks for a backordered part). It was obvious that someone tried doing the work before (without reading the clymer manual they had or without the proper tools).

Now, here is the thing that baffled the crap out of me. His highbeam indicator was on all the time, but really low and his horn was hit or miss. PLUS his tail light warning indicator would come on sporadically. I verified the horn worked by itself. We checked the fuses and found the taillight fuse connector was broken and somebody decided to solder the broken piece to the fuse itself and just set the fuse back in. But that still didn't explain the horn and the highbeam. We checked the main junction box for connections and checked to make sure there was continuity to the controls. No problems there. Then we traced a ton of wires leading into the headlight housing. So, I took the headlight housing off and found that someone striped the sheathing off one of the highbeam leads and spliced on a brown wire. I was like...WTF is that. The schematics indicated that the brown lead was suppose to lead back to the ignition so the lights can be turned on in park mode. So I just closed off the lead taped up the blue and all is well. But still why in the world would someone do that? Oh...let's see, this wire came lose...let's um...connect it here.

Oh I replaced the fuse connector also (with the help of a propane torch) and all is well now. But still WTF! Damn idiots.

EDITS: Don't post when watching the football...too many typos

 

There is a lot to be said for DIY, but some people take that a tad to far, god knows wot he was thinking.

 

Try doing it for a living. You would be amazed at some of the s*@$ people bring me to fix.

 

post some pics Woo....

 

Ha! I would if I felt like struggling with the light again. Besides...it's all together now...don't want to risk breaking another bolt (finally bought an 3/8-1/2" adapter for my torque wrench).