Bonneville America Forums Forums Technical Forums Accessories Problem with front turn signal replacement.

I bought some turn signals which match the ones I recently put on the rear of my bike. The turn signals I got were dual filament signals, but I didn't figure that would be a big deal. When I put the ones on the rear, they began blinking faster, which I expected, because I had read somewhere that I would need a voltage regulator to fix that problem. No big deal.

However, when I went to do the front turn signals today, they wouldn't blink at all. In fact even the rear ones stopped blinking. The light would come on but it wouldn't blink. Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

Two things. You need to get yourself a flasher made for LEDs. Second, take out the turn signal indicator bulb out of the dash.

Soren

Excellent link Soren, thanks.

You're welcome.

BTW, the flasher you'll want to get is CF13GL-02.

One more thing, unless you take the indicator bulb out of the dash, your turn signals will flash like hazard lights.

Soren

Wait, he said dual filament, thats not LED and chances are all he needs to do is change the bulbs , or flasher but not to one made for LEDs.

Yeah, Dog's right, the bulbs are not LED.

Change the bulbs? implying that one is out then? All of the bulbs light up, they just don't blink. Also, (demonstrating great mechanical ignorance here,) what is a flasher, where can I find it on the bike, and where can I get one which is not for an LED? Also what's the deal with taking the indicator light out of the dash? What does that do?

I was wondering if it was an issue of grounding somehow, like maybe I'm not grounding the wires propperly and that is the problem. I'm totally clueless here.

No I mean like if you had 1157 and you needed a 2057.

If you have the dual element lights I'm thinking of they have 3 wires, red/black/black with white pin strip, am I correct?

When they were flashing too quick on the rear, that means your connections were wrong. You must have had the 2nd / smaller element connected. I will check the wiring colour on my bike later tonight and let you know which one to connect. I do remember that the colours didn't match, ie: black did not connect to black, and you will have one spare wire not connected.

When you connected the front indicators and they stopped, you may have mixed the polarity so they are drawing current from the flasher circuit at oposing times, as they both use the same flasher that...... now I'm guessing.

As stated before I will check which wires I connected on my dual element lights.

Ok, hopefully here is your answer :
The dual element turn signals should have three wires (red/black/black+white), if they don't the rest of this post means nothing

1. Connect the Black+white pin stripe from the indicator to the plain black wire on your bike, they are the ground.
2. Connect the red wire from the indicator to the green/red on left side, and to the green/blue on right side, these are you active.
3. The plain black wire from the indicator is for second filament, you don't need this so tape it up.

Do the same on the front turn signals and you should be good to go!

One other thing I've Run into may be helpful here. Many flashers are extremely resistence sensative. We don't know if front signals were connected when rears were blinking fast. Rear flashers with no fronts splits resistence in half causing the quick flash. Also using dissimilar bulbs(halogen, led) can create further quandry. First things first,check wiring. Also, don't wind two power wires together to use both filiments for brighter light, too much resistence.
Good luck

There seems to be alot of confusion here (and I may be adding to it), as chopperpaul just stated, by adding lower resistance bulds (LED, Halogen) will cause the lihts to blink faster and a voltage regulator is needed. That being said, it sounds like to me that when you added a incondesint light to the system, there was too much of a drop for the flasher to work properly and would come steady on.

The comment of removing the indicator light from the dash is cause it dosen't work on a power / ground basis like the other three. It takes power from one side and grounds on the other (example, you turn on the left turn signals and the dash light will ground on the right turn system, and vise versa) which is why you can't install a LED dash light cause it would only work in one direction cause they are polarity sesitive (some modifications with a couple of diodes will fix this though). So in this case, once the turn signals are altered, it'll change the system dynamics and the dash light could work as a link between each side and cause a 4-way flashing effect.

These might some of the issues you are having or not, but hopefullt it'll help you understand the problem a bit more to fixing it.

WOOO HOOO!!! Got that thing figured out. Part stupidity and part low wattage. Turns out that the reason that the signals weren't blinking is because I had actually turned them on to test them BEFORE I bolted them to the bike. I assume that the bolt grounds it or something, because without having it connected the light just went on continuosly. Once I bolted them on today and tried it, no problems. Then I upgraded the bulb to a 23 watt, which fit the same socket and wallah! No fast blinking anymore either. No voltage regulator needed either.

Not being very mechanically inclined, gaining these minor victories is somehow really satisfying. Now my front signals match the back.

Thank you everyone for your help and suggestions! I'm grateful it was an easy fix.

Cool, good on ya!
Now you should post some photos to show us how it looks!

Will do runner, I'll probably get some shots this weekend, the weather here is supposed to be terrible next couple of days. I took some shots of the process too, so I can show a few of that too.