81 GS550 Complete No Power

[Guest]

Hey Guys-

I'm helping a friend sort out a 1981 GS550.

Bike is rough but low mileage and not totally hacked up. $100 barn find deal..........you know the ones.

Moving on. I hook a battery to it, turn the key on.........nothing. Complete dead. I have battery power to the starter solenoid, then there is a wire that runs to a single fuse via red wire. As far as I can tell power goes in and then stops, no wire exiting. Directly below this is a stack of 4 fuses, none of them have voltage at all.

Should that first single fuse be wired to that secondary block?

Could someone help? This thing has more wiring than any bike I've ever seen, I'm a Harley guy, I could build a harness and make it work, but if I could get the system powered atleast I could try to make the bike run before we sink more time into it chasing our tails.

Thanks in advance.

[hannibal]

Have you grabbed a factory manual from Bassclif's site? members.dslextreme.com/users/bikecliff/

There are 2 issues I think: getting power to the starter and getting power to the rest of the bike. You said you get nothing when you turn the key to on. Have you tried starting the bike? If you've tried and nothing happens (which I'm guessing you have), try jumping the terminals on the starter solenoid. This sends power directly from the battery to the starter (same effect as hitting the starter button). If this works, then the starter solenoid "trigger" coming from the starter button would be bad.

If the single fuse only has one side connected to the battery and the other side has no wiring, then obviously the bike couldn't get power. The wiring diagram in the manual linked above doesn't show a fuse box so I'm not sure where the output of the main single fuse should go. It typically runs to ignition switch. With the key on, power is sent back to the fuse box.