Thats what I've found. Not only does the thing think its starting, thus killing the lights, it also displays the FI light because it thinks its starting, and other weird sh*t. Last night when I just cracked the case of the assembly, I found a large metal pin, the first thing I saw. It had some crap on it so I just scraped it off with my knife, then wiped it off w/ my finger and put it back together. It worked immediatly, but it is def. not a perm. fix. It was still a little inconsistant, flashing on and off under hard accelleration etc. I'm going to tear it apart tommorow and clean the whole thing to see if that will fix it. But regardless I have a post up in the wanted fourm's for a switch to replace it with.

Originally Posted by sv61

Not for sure, but somewhere in the circuitry, the electronics THINK the starter button is still pressed, therefore not allowing the headlight to power on. I have not taken the starter switch assembly apart yet, but suspect the issue to be on the switch cluster SOMEWHERE on the throttle side (starter, kill switch, etc).

There are no fancy electronic wizardry going on here. The start switch has a normally open set of contacts for the start circuit and a set of normally closed contacts for the headlight circuit. Pushing the start button closes the normally open contacts thus energizing the starter circuit at the same time you opening the normally closed contacts thus killings the headlight circuit.

As the start contacts are use intermittently they last along time compared to the headlight contacts that are used anytime the key is on and the starter is not engaged. That’s why they headlight side of the switch normally fails first.

The logic behind this set-up is simple. When starting the bike it turns off the headlights so all the voltage/current is used to start the bike.

Dodd,

How did you make out on this problem?