Front Brake Light works with Ignition off

  • Thread starter Thread starter laverlesmains
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laverlesmains

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odd one this.

with the key off, the front brake light comes on when I squeeze the lever.  No other lights or the horns work with the ignition off.

Is an italian safety feature, or a bug in the wiring.
 
bug in the wiring. but one question, why do you have a front brake light? Ours are on the back! Was it used by the French army?
 
It's not a problem to lose sleep over. It may even have been done purposely for some reason. Maybe the previous owner was in the habit of coasting down hill with the engine off, but wanted the brake light to work.

If you want to fix it, and your wiring is reasonably original, have a look in the headlight shell. There's a several strips of spade-type connectors. There's a bunch of connectors with red wires and a bunch with brown wires. There are also some other colours, but don't worry about them for the purposes of this exercise. The red wires are live from the batttery and the brown are switched via the ignition. Sounds as if your brake light wire is plugged into the mess of red wires rather than the brown. I thhink the brake light wire is brown, so if you can see a brown wire plugged into a red wire, that one might be the culprit.

If your bike wiring has been substantially modified, then the problem will still be of a similar nature to what I described above, but you're on your own when it comes to identifying the location of the interconnection and the wire colours.

Cheers,
Cam

 
why do you have a front brake light? Ours are on the back!
Click to expand...

so that I don't have to turn 'round to see if it's working..


I'll go bug hunting in the headlight bucket.. 

thanks all

Tim
 
Brake switch line is grey but it should be supplied from the black accessory circuit which is switched on and off with the ignition. Sounds like your front brake light switch is wired into the wrong side of the ignition switch.

   Keith
 
Correct - the brake light switch wire is grey. That's the wire from the light to the two switches. On the other side of the two switches are black wires which go to earth.

However, the wire providing the 12V supply to the light is brown (according to the diagram anyway). It runs from the wiring spaghetti in the headlight to the brake light. That's the wire Tim needs to find in the headlight shell and connect to the right place.

Cheers,
Cam
 
You got your wires crossed Cam, brown is taillight supply. Brake light is supplied at +ve potential at one side of the pressure switch from the black accessory circuit and back to earth via the grey wire then the bulb. The black wires feeding the brake light switches do not run to earth they are a switched supply.
  Chase the live wire on the front brake switch back to where it is wrongly connected and then ..erm.. rightly connect it.  ;)

  Keith
 
I stand corrected. Thanks Keith.

I blame the blurry black and white wiring diagram I downloaded off the internet. It's hard to trace the wires without going cross-eyed. I followed the black from the brake light switch and eventually came to an earth symbol. I obviously did a crossover somewhere and eneded up on the wrong wire.

On the strength of that cock-up. I'm going to draw a coloured version of the wiring diagram for my 3CL on CAD.

Cheers,
Cam
 
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