Orange/white wire with red marker... what does it do?

[bwringer]

So there I was, working on the wiring in a 1982 GS850GL last night, and encountered some confusion while sorting out that commonly roasted connector behind the steering stem. You know, that green nine-pin connector with two pins not used that contains the stupid stator loop and often melts.

Anyhoo, there are two orange/white wires that pass through this connector and one has little red markers on it on either side of the connector. And of course the marker slipped off one side when we cut out the roached connector, so we had to do some CSI-level scientific analysis of cut and stripe angles to sort out which orange/white wire had the marker.

Everything's all good now (holy crap the lights are a lot brighter!), but even after peering at the wiring diagram for several minutes with a magnifier, I could not sort out what the heck these wires actually do and how they're different, and what the potential consequences are of mixing them up.

I seem to recall I once knew, a memory of a memory, but it's buried under the mental rubble somewhere.

So what do these wires do, and what's the difference between the unadorned orange/white and the orange/white with a red marker?

"A worthy man, but his memory is like a lumber-room: thing wanted always buried. "
- Gandalf, in a letter to Frodo speaking of Barliman Butterbur in Tolkien's "Fellowship of the Ring"

 

[Gorminrider]

I have a gs650 but I'll stick my neck out and say it goes directly to kill switch. They mark it because there are two O/Ws using that connector and the guy/gal at the factory needs know which goes where in the connecor...and, if testing too
.

 

[bwringer]

Excellent. Thank you -- no idea why I couldn't find this, but I only looked for a few minutes on a black-and-white diagram before deciding to solve the puzzle via other means.

If I'm reading that correctly, it looks like the consequence of mixing these up could be that the starter could operate with the kill switch off. Which could be ungood.

And it's pretty certain it works the same on other GS models; Suzuki changed very little between models.

Still, couldn't they scrape up just ONE MORE wire color? Sheesh.


Like most here, I'd like to have a quiet, violent word with the criminals who design Suzuki electrics (yes, they're still designing and perpetrating electrics for failure from the factory on their modern bikes). I suspect there would be a long line for a "punch a Suzuki electrical design engineer" booth at the Hamamatsu county fair.

 

[Steve]

I will confirm. :encouragement:

Yes, there are two orange/white wires at the three-pin connector that goes to the right-side handlebar switch. The one with the red sleeve is the feed ("hot") wire from the fuse to the hot side of the kill switch. The dead side of the kill switch feeds two items. One is the other orange/white wire, which then goes to the coils and ignitor. The other item is the starter button, which then feeds the yellow/green wire that goes to the clutch "safety" switch, then the starter solenoid. Gorminrider's picture shows that perfectly.

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