I've had an interesting week. First of, I was on my way to work and pulled in to refuel. Filled up and went to reset the trip meter and it felt wierd. Not the light clicking I normallly felt when winding the dials over but quite a doughy feel, with a lot of resistance. Sure enough, as soon a I pulled out onto the road, I looked down and neither the odometer or tripmeter were registering anything.
Had a visit to Steptoe one evening and explained my woes to him. He jumped on the phone to Max whom he knew had a couple of spares at his place.
A few days later, I lobbed in at Max's and came away with, not one but two complete instrument clusters, One of which is off a police bike with its white face (will check this one out soon enough). Many thanks, mate!
The second speedo is one Steptoe had previously repaired the broken needle on, and a quick check with my drill and a square bit proved the odometer and tripmeter worked, and that the speedo was reasonably accurate, so I set about swapping it with my buggered one.
This entailed just undoing the two bolts that hold the speedo to the instrument bracket, undoing the speedo cable, then removing the headlight from the shell to unplug the wiring connector and pull the wiring out the back of the headlight shell. Sounds simple, eh?
It was. Took all of 20 minutes for the swap. Hardest bit was getting the inner acorn nut to start on the mounting bolt of the speedo but after achieving that, I just plugged the wiring connector back in, plugged the bulb back into the headlight shelll, then took the bike for a quick run up the road to make sure all was good.
I headed off to work that afternoon at 2.30 and the speedo worked a treat. The interesting part was when I finished at midnight and began the trip home. When I switched on the headlight, the light worked ok, but the beam spread just looked wierd, and when I switched to high beam in a dark bit, it lit the road immediately in front of the bike instead of further up the road. I got flashed a few times on the highway ( only passed a few vehicles at that time of night) so I knew something was badly amiss with it. Got up this morning to investigate (I had a theory) and this is what I found -
^ Initial check before touching anything - Low beam. Note the light scatter all over the board
^ High beam. More intense light but low down.
^ Pulled headlight out of shell to check bulb position. Scuse the crappy pic
^ Unplugged bulb from its adapter and turned it up the other way. These HID bulbs mount in their adapter using a sort of Bayonet type fitting. Until now I hadn't known that they could be reversed in the socket. Now i know.
The bulb was upside down and the shield that normally masks the light scatter from the bottom of the light (causing upward glare) was now shielding the top of the reflector and making the most light come from the bottom of the reflector causing bad light scatter and glare for oncoming vehicles. It's all fixed now, though.
^ Low beam. Much better beam cutoff
^ High beam. Just a higher up version of the low beam, still has the cutoff.
I'll be much more careful next time round. Can I blame nightshiftitus for a slipup like this??
