Burned wiring

I have an 02 R1150R. Just bought it this spring, It has 3K on it. This AM I started it and all the warning lights went nuts. I turned it off and restarted it. I heard a frying sound and was engulfed in a thick cloud of white acrid smoke. Went of work in car. A little while ago I pulled the fuze/relay box under the seat. There is a wire, bare and burnt in half and melted into a dozen others. It blew 2 ten and one Four amp fuze. And strangly, two other fuzes that check out ok are missing the clear plastic window on top, go figure. A couple of months ago I installed a set of Moto lights They and the bike have worked flawlessly till now I cannot think how the lights could have caused this problem. They have a seperate fuze and relay. I tapped into the lisence plate light hot wire to power the relay. The hot wire is brown and the brown wire at the scene of the meltdown is intact and unmelted Called dealer and he is to get back to me as to when he can drag it to shop. The thing is a mess

Questions;


Can they repair without replacing harness?

If they need to replace harness can they just replace the half that runs from the relay box rearward?

and the dreaded question; anyone know how mucho this melt down could end up costing?

I love this bike, and I hope no one else out there suffers this.
any info would be appreciated

welcome to the club

At least yours went off at home - I was a hundred or so miles away.

As to whether they can repair or not, is up to the electrician and how bad it burned.

As to the harness - check Max BMW's online parts catalog. I recall the main harness for mine was about a grand.

Sold the bike for what I could get out of it and moved on.

Ouch...

I'd contact every boneyard I could to see about a complete harness. Harnesses are really well integrated, so replacing a section is easily more work than as complete. Also, by replacing it all, you should see what/where the cause was and can make it better.

The only harness failures (2) I've seen were cut-throughs from routing past an edge without enough protection.

I'd also gather potential talent to help, depending on your abilities. It's a complete stripdown to the runtrain/frame, but not all that bad on a bare model like a Roadster. Good Hunting & Good Luck... <<<)))

P.S. the 2 above posts may want to see if failure area was similar

please follow up on this thread folks! i've got one of these bikes, and if i need to be adding some extra insulation to a problem area, i'd be super grateful to find out in advance!

thanks.

check out beemer boneyard you may be able to find a harness at about 1/3 the price there from a crashed bike then take it to an independent mechanic and have the work done, it'll be a big labor bill as well, so you might as well save money where you can

Burned

The suspect wire is green and black or dark grey. According to my wiring diagram it is the right turn signal wire.

b52g said:

Can they repair without replacing harness?

If they need to replace harness can they just replace the half that runs from the relay box rearward?

and the dreaded question; anyone know how mucho this melt down could end up costing?

Click to expand...

No. Wiring harness damage is very pervasive. It can exist anywhere.

No. the harness is one piece and you don't want to hack apart a brand-new harness.

$850 to $1500 retail for a harness (depending on the exact model) and an estimated 5.5 hours of labor.

Burned

I checked the harness again this weekend and you are right Anton. The further I dig into the harness the more bare {read burned} wires I find. Turned into Ins co on Friday. They called today and told me to inform them of the prognosis. At least they didn't tell me to go to blazes right off the bat. I've got my fingers crossed. Bike goes into shop on the 6th of July. Since it is a Roadster, hopefully the cost of the harness will be toward the low end of the scale. BTW, I checked Beemer boneyard and they have no harness for the bike.

b52g said:

I tapped into the lisence plate light hot wire to power the relay. .... The suspect wire is green and black or dark grey. According to my wiring diagram it is the right turn signal wire.

Click to expand...

My diagram shows that as the license plate light.

Do you know how many milliamps that relay draws? What size fuse was in #2?

If the wiring burned and on a fused line, the short had to be before the fuse.

Burnt wiring harness

I think I posted this here awhile back but I also destroyed my complete harness on my '02GS by changing a light bulb. Obviously something shorted and in a few seconds, the harness was gone. The bill was appx. $1,500. but my insurance picked it up as a fire claim.

Motorman said:

If the wiring burned and on a fused line, the short had to be before the fuse.

Click to expand...

It's not that simple. Say the circuit normally drew 1.5A and is fused at 4. Something is added to the circuit that brings the normal current close to 4 and the fuse burns out periodically. The owner says, "OK, this circuit needs a bigger fuse because I added something to it" and goes to ten or so. The wiring, though, can't handle sustained 4A loads and gets hot. That softens the insulation and at some stress point (probably at a place where it's tid tightly to the frame) the conductors sink into an adjacent +12V wire. Now the circuit is powered by that wire, which may not be fused at all.This is happening at many places on the bike, and other parts melt into ground wires so then the wire really smokes and makes a few more connections, which cause the +12V wire to hit ground somewhere and it really smokes because it's heavier gauge, and eats into everything it touches. That's a real mess and it's often not possible to really perform a postmortem.

Burned

No idea what the repaly pulls. A 4amp fuze was in #2. It and 2 ten amps blew also. When I installed the Motolights I wired it per instructions to the tail light hot wire. Ran greaat for a few days. Then the tail light out warning light illuminated intermitantly then stayed on. Called Motolight and a very nice and helpful guy said the computed interpreted the extra draw or drop as a burned out bulb. He said to wire it to any other switched 12 volt source , so I wired it to the lisence plate light. Can't tell if the destroyed wire is blue with a grey stripe or grey with a blue stripe., too melted and fused. It is raining cats and dogs here for the past several days and is supposed to keep it up big time, so I don't feel so bad about not having a ride.