Sometimes life gets in the way

It's quite a while since I posted anything about my efforts to get the dear old Trophy going again. Sometimes life gets in the way, by which I mean other projects or activities have taken priority. In brief: annual fortnight holiday, preceded by a not inconsiderable amount of necessary maintenance on the family jalopy, succeeded by some DIY which often seems necessary when returning from a holiday. Finally, there was fixing up my dear wife's bike, a Yamaha SZR660, which I had promised to do so she could sell it. It should have been straightforward but how often is that things that should be easy actually are?
The carb seals were blown - they had a putty-like consistency, probably because they had been attacked by new ethanol in contemporary petrol. The carbs cleaned up beautifully with the proper care and attention, and a nice new set of seals, but then I found a lot of niggling other problems. One of these was a non-functional rear brake light switch. As it happens, this is a Brembo master cylinder with a hydraulic switch that screws into the rear brake line. There is nothing to see externally. It just stopped working.

I had a look in the interweb to see if I could find any clues or ways to fix it. By way of clues, I found a car enthusiast who had suffered several failures with switches of this kind. He had sectioned one of them with a band saw (scary). It was made up of a hydraulic seal in the form of a diaphragm that bulges up when the brakes is pressurised. As it pushes up, it lifts a metal plate into contact with two terminals. The whole mechanism is encapsulated. He found that the plastic encapsulation around one of the terminals was swollen and melted from overheating. His diagnosis was that the current flowing from partial application of the brake caused arcing which, with the encapsulation, couldn't dissipate the heat generated as a by product. Anyway, this means no repair is possible.


So I found a dealer with a genuine replacement part (same price as pattern) and sorted it with a 50 mile round trip. One careful remove-replace-bleed later, all was well. Why have I troubled you with this non-Triumph tale? Because it proves I haven't been idle and, when I connected a very nice Motobatt AGM battery to Trophy 544, what should I discover but the only electrical item not working was the hydraulic brake light switch ... ... so today i did another 50 mile round trip to the same dealer for a Genuine Triumph replacement.


The replacement is a superceded part which incorporates a banjo bolt. The original was a banjo bolt with a threaded head, into which the hydraulic switch was mounted. Doh! I'd already found external corrosion so maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that it wasn't too good on the inside. Only I'm sure it was working before I stripped the rear brake down. I'm toying with the idea of putting a relay into the feed for the rear brake light. There's space for it right in front of the rear light unit, next to the fuse box so it would be simple to do. That would solve any arcing because it would mean the switch body would be dealing with a very low current. The twin lamps in the rear light mean that they currently have to deal with (2x21w)/12v=3.45amps. It's a thought anyway.

On September 30th, it'll be exactly 21 years since she first ventured out on the roads. So my new aim is to get her rolling for then. Wish me luck. (meanwhile, I think I've filled my blogger photo quota, so something else has got in the way of posting)

[Addendum 25th of September: I've created a Flickr account and am now linking to photos there, hence the two pictures in this post]