steve_earwig wrote:Hello

The weather's very variable here at the moment, days seem to sweep between summer and monsoon all the time, you never know if it's t-shirt and shorts or jacket and wellies...
Anyway, between gardening (when possible), social stuff, sodding about with Linux (getting nowhere fast again) and finally working on my bike I don't seem to have much time to do more than have a quick squint on here. Also, I've just had one of these delivered to my garage:

It's not mine (life expectancy in seconds...) it has some after-market dash in it but it doesn't work. I'll take some pictures of the wiring for your amusement - it's a mess! Apparently it was fitted by a salesman for the manufacturer. He should have stuck to what he knows

Just a swift 1 - the dash on the Honda is one of these -
http://www.gpt.it/GPT/d_4.html - very smart, very trick, very expensive and... very not waterproof

When I took it apart there was corrosion on the bottom of the circuit board, which I cleaned up with a brass brush but it didn't change anything. What was happening was when the bike was first switched on there was just a red warning light glowing dimly. After running it for a few minutes all the lights came up with "ERROR - BATTERY" flashing on the display. Then I started pulling it apart again and when I pulled off the temperature sensor wire it went dead - it was earthing itself out through the sensor, as the temperature went up the resistamce of the sender dropped and... So, I thought, all I need to do is provide it with another earth (I couldn't actually see where the feed went as it disappeared under the lcd on the board).
All big smiles, pats on the back, taken out for coffee, I was feeling quite pleased with myself.
That afternoon I spent 2 hours sticking the bike back together (bloody thing

). Finally, just as an afterthought, I decided to run it.... First crank of the engine the bloody thing immediatly burned out

I'm still not sure why.
I did take some pics of the wiring, but only after I'd started sorting it out. I was basically told not to bother but the way I see it is if you went to someone's house to change a fuse and noticed that the wiring was so bad it was a death trap, could you just walk away knowing that if it burned down the finger would be pointed at you for being the last one to work on it?
On a more positive note: I'm running Linux Mint
