Removing/fixing gear indicator switch (sender)

[79-GS550-L]

Hello everyone,

I just bought a '79 GS550 yesterday. For my first repair job, I want to fix the gear lights. It has 6 lights, plus a separate neutral. Neutral works fine, as do 2-6. But there is no ground signal for 1 coming through the harness. I figure the switch contacts are dirty. So I removed the sprocket cover and I see a bundle of wires coming down from above into a round thing. It looks like it is a small cylinder that was filled with epoxy (I can see the wires disappearing into it). There was a screw on either side. I removed the screws, but the thing won't budge (I tried tapping it with a hammer, and prying it gently). Any ideas how to get this out? I'm wondering if the epoxy was added in by a previous owner, since I haven't heard that in anyone's description of the piece. Do I need to chip out the epoxy to see if there are any screws in there? Is this even the right part?

I've attached a picture of the part. It was all blackened, but after scraping away the grease you can see that hard orangey glue stuff the wires go into.

Thanks,
Alex

[Steve]

Does your bike have six individual lights for the gears, or one of those digital indicators?

If it has six lights, the bulb for #1 might be burned out. Try swapping it with another posititon to see if it works.
It might be the bulb, not the sending unit.


.

[79-GS550-L]

Ok I fixed it. I do have 6 individual lights, I tested and all bulbs worked fine. The sender took a surprising amount of prying to pop off (prying from the top worked best) - I think it just had a lot of old grease caked onto it. The orange stuff was indeed some sort of glue, covering a terrible soldering job. I had to dremel away the glue from the wires carefully. Oil had seeped into the solder connection through little pores in the glue, and had forced the wire & contact apart for the 1st gear contact. I resoldered, reglued, and now all 6 gear lights work.

[jknappsax]

Digital indicator on a 1978 GS 750

After doing the Electrex upgrade, my digital display would sometimes light all seven segments, or sometimes just looked like gibberish. I figured that by regulating all three phases, a raw voltage was now lower due to regulation. It looks on the wiring diagram that the shift lever has a switch that must feed a 1 of 8 decoder for the seven-segment, and maybe after 29 years, the regulator or a filter cap is marginal with the lower voltage. I've been meaning to take the display out and troubleshoot, but it has been a low priority. Anybody ever dig into this type of display?