TOPIC:

To answer the part that was never answered, no, the fuses and fuse box should not be hot.

Heat means resistance, and that means a bad connection.

It is entirely possible that you fixed your problem when you replaced the fuse. A bad connection may have caused enough heat to melt the solder inside the fuse thus breaking contact and killing the motor. Then, when the solder inside the fuse cooled, contact was made again and the bike ran.

Now, obviously I can't say for certain that this occurred, but it is entirely possible. I have seen glass fuses get hot and melt the solder inside, then cool down and work again.

Clean all the fuse connections, or switch to blade fuses by installing a new fuse block.

steell wrote:

To answer the part that was never answered, no, the fuses and fuse box should not be hot.

That depends on the design. In mine, they run a 55W light off an 8A fuse which means the fuse runs at about 60% of rated current and that will get them hot. If it gets hot enough to vaporize at rated current, it's going to get hot at lower values of current.

Old fuses often have the electrode bent and blue color from heating over time (that's why they need to be pitched regularly).

The fuses shouldn't get hot enough to discolor wires or melt insulation, but a little heating may be OK.

Patton, I did look at the wires from the module to the igniter, and yes, the outer insulation was brittle, burnt and disintegrating. But the inner wires checked ok. I rewrapped the wires and put some shrink tube on them.
Those wires run fairly close to my header, so I'm thinking about running them through a piece of aluminum tube as a heat shield.

Steell, I'm sure you're right about the fuse. Because there was this little brown droplet of what looked like flux inside the tube. The thing was unsoldering and resoldering itself. I put a new fuse in it and it runs great now. Plus, the new fuse isn't getting as hot as the other one was. Barely warm.

I think I did see a little fuse box somewhere that uses the new blade type fuses. I think I'll change to one of those.