This is just a side comment on SuperChuck's continuing electrical problems all of which I went through when I bought my brand new, zero mileage 2008 AVL Classic in 2010 from the lawyers for an out-of-business dealer in Missouri.
I was far from an idiot about cars and motorcycles, but some of you remember that I knew NOthing about these particular bikes except from what I read online, in Pete's miraculous manual and from the guys on this forum who knew them inside and out. I was even afraid to start the damn thing until I did a complete dealer service on it from stem to stern.
Anyway...months passed, I did all I could to learn as much as possible, wrote and received thousands of words back and forth on these forums, on and on and on.... New battery, new fluids, took the carb (BS 29) apart just to do it, new gas.
Then I found I had NO lights at all. NONE. I started tr-shooting wires and connections until I finally discovered (by chance) that Every Single Bulb on The Bike Was BLOWN OUT including the directional flasher. It blew my mind! Was THIS why the bike sat in a back room for two years unsold? How do you blow BOTH directionals? Both Hi and Lo beams? Do you put the right on, watch the bulb blow and then put the left on? Put he Hi beam on, watch it blow, then switch to the Lo?
Anyway...long story long, it totally blew my trust of ANYTHING electrical on the bike and I spent the next two years totally bullet-proofing it all (AND getting all the bulbs needed AND spares) and upgrading everything to the best of my ability including unwrapping the whole main harness (what a clusterfuck THAT was! Unbelieveable!) and rewrapping the whole thing with black cloth vintage NON-sticky harness tape. It was originally wrapped with about a thousand feet of sticky black vinyl electrical tape. UnGODly mess! Some of the splices were just totally exposed twisted copper. Inside the headlight took days of fiddling to make sense of.
The strange thing is that after I replaced all the bulbs and had not done anything else yet (rectifier, alternator, fuses, nothing) it never blew a bulb again. No one on the forums at that time could ever come up with a scenario to explain how that might happen.
Sorry I can't help you more, Chuck, but I'm not really good at electrical crap (I use the water pipe method), I'm just stubborn and persistent and like a dog with a bone. I'm not happy unless it's right and won't fuck up on the road.
Anyway, by last year or the year before, I finally trust the damn thing to not leave me dead in a ditch somewhere sending up smoke signals, but I had to change, fix, upgrade, replace, touch, feel, kiss, hug and pet everything before that happened. Nothing on the bike is the way it was when it left the capable hands of Mr. Black Vinyl Sticky Tape in Chennai except for the tires and it's a waste of $$$ for me to replace them because I can hardly even ride the damn thing any more or get the damn thing on the center stand now, in fact last time I rode it I couldn't and it still sits on the side stand (whose switch was disconnected 9 years ago to get THAT out of the equations).