TOPIC:

Hey Guys, working on a 1981 kz750 I picked up last spring... It has been a nickel and dime garage cafe racer project for me. Well I finally got a few days this winter to work on her and I chopped up the rear fender and put on a new combo tail/brake/turn signal LED setup. The problem I have come across in wiring them is the unit I purchased has 5 wires and the bike side has 7. I tested and labeled all the wires and actually have the unit functioning properly. The two extra wires on the bike side are black with a yellow (or perhaps white) stripe and from what I have read these are turn signal ground wires.

The frustrating part of all this is with those wires disconnected the brake warning light on the instrument cluster blinks rapidly indicating a malfunction with the rear lights. Just wondering if anyone has solved this issue already, is there somewhere I can run those wires to make the system function correctly? If not, is there a way to disable that flashing brake light indicator? I'd like to not pull out the bulb as it is also the oil warning light. Thanks in advance for your help.

JC

Just to clarify what I am talking about:

Picture shows the five wires connected to the new unit as well as the two leads (which are spliced from one common wire) that have no connection point. And to correct my previous post, the gauge lamp is the brake/fuel indicator.. Not the oil lamp.

The B/Y is the ground. Try using them instead of grounding to the frame.
Steve

So use that ground instead of the other black wire coming from the other part of the harness?

Is it B/Y too?
Steve

If the light is flashing it's telling you the bulb is gone if I remember correctly, so because you have an LED set up which is very low wattage it thinks the bulb is blown, There's a unit that controls all that, you'd probably need to put a resistor in the circuit, in line with the stop lamp to fool it or remove the whole thing and wire it so it purely lights up in the instrument cluster when the brake light operates or just do away with the whole idea.

If you look up in line resistors for LED turn signals you will get an idea of what I'm talking about as they use them there to stop the signals flashing too fast due to the low resistance of the LED bulbs if they don't change the flasher unit to an LED one.

I switched to LED's. My turn signals wouldn't flash. I had to get a flasher for them. When I went to AZ and OR asking about one I got the Fish eye. They sell the LED's and the resisters. They pull about the same power as the bulbs and defeated the purpose of having LED's in the first place. My tail light is still a bulb. The warning light wouldn't work without it.
Steve

I swapped out the turn signals last year with LED's and had to do the same thing, upgrade the flasher to get them to opperate correctly. I will look into a resistor and see if that does the trick. I would want to wire that into the brake circuit power wire correct?

Edit:
Or Swest were you saying that it won't work period without a standard bulb?

Yes and use the ground wires both tail and signals.
Steve

Ok great, I'll give it a shot. Thank you for the help.

Rave71 wrote: Ok great, I'll give it a shot. Thank you for the help.

Just put the resistor in series with the live wire connection before the bulb, you could work out the size of resistor from the wattage of the bulb, but as those are the same wattage bulbs as turn signals then whatever they sell for those would be the correct number of ohms.

For turn signals definitely get an LED flasher unit, I got one for a Yamaha Cafe bike I had with LED signals from a local auto parts store it was for a GM car with LED signals, I think it was about $12 and worked fine. That way you get LED signals and the saving in power consumption which you will lose with a resistor as Swest points out.

So I got my resistors in the mail and finally got back down in the garage to play around with them. First I tried wiring the resister in the brake light circuit but my indicator still was flashing. Next I tried it in the tail light circuit, same problem and finally I tried putting one in both circuits and the light was still flashing away. Everything functions properly I just know that the flashing light will drive me nuts if I button it all up and leave it as is. If anyone has an other ideas please let me know.