I have defeated the prince of darkness.

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Just rebuilt the forks and installed the proper headlight ears on my early fastback. WHen i put everything back together, the headlight/pilot light no longer worked. After scratching my head for a while, i took apart and cleaned the toggle switch. There were actual cobwebs in there so i thought ...heh maybe that was it. NOPE. Started chasing stuff down and figured out there was a wiring harness ground not hooked up. Hooked the ground up and POW everything works. So i'm like...why did it work before with those stamped steal headlight ears and not with the proper painted ears.....thats all that changed. The only thing i can figure is that it was actually grounding from the frame to the trees to the forks to the headlight ears to the housing to one of the grounds in the headlight bucket. CRAZY!
 
You didn't really defeat him... he just tossed you an easy one to lull you into a comfortable place :lol:
 
What I discovered as I worked at N-V, is that Lucas consideered us to be a gnat on the ass of the universe. They really didn't give a shit what kind of rubbish they sent us. A lot of time was spent trouble-shooting production Lucas harneeses because they didn't work properly. Based on personal experience, I'd say 25 to 30 percent of the harnesses were faulty. How many of the faulty ones made it through production without the faults being found, I'd guess maybe half of them. That means 10 to 15 % of Commandos went out of the factory with faulty wiring. There must have been some really bad bikes out there in the early years.

I tired to interest management into dropping Lucas and going with Bosch for all our electrical stuff, but they reckoned Bosch was relatively unkonwn in the US (beg your pardon), so they stuck with Lucas. i'm willing to admit that, in the 1980's and later, Lucas really got their act together and started to produce fairly good quality stuff, but I have the feeling that the small customers like N-V were alw2ays sucking the hind tit.
 
I worked for them 72-94 and unfortunately you are correct Frank, the Birmingham factories were a nightmare to source from. We were a small division making marine parts (among other rotating electricals) from std automotive starters and alternators and it wasn't until Marelli bought the starter and alternator division that we were able to get better quality and deliveries.
Strangely, when I started in Nov 72, we were producing Dynastarts, one of which was basically a Bosch flywheel design used on small 2 strokes which had been refined a little by our engineers and did not rely on our parent for base parts.
They probably saw the writing on the wall with the UK motorcycle industry but they didn't help any. The car business eventually imploded itself and they were effectively out of business on mainstream OE in the mid 90's.
 
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