Rebuilding a Motorcycle is a Lot Like Coding
About a month and a half ago, I bought a 1980 Suzuki GS850GT. My youngest son and I had been talking about building a cafe racer for a long time and we came across this bike. It felt like a great opportunity to give it a shot.
As a quick aside, I did some research on the history of this bike, and it's really an impressive machine. It was a well-built motorcycle and was the only version to feature a shaft drive. The 850 used the 750's general motor design and fell into a class that catered to riders craving the power of the 1000 but fearing the insurance premiums of that larger option option. This quote from Cycle World in 1979 was especially interesting.
The engine, for the most part, is based on the GS750, not the GS1000. When Suzuki officials explain that 750cc bikes are more popular than 1000s. there is no direct competition for an 850 as opposed to a 1000 and that insurance rates for 1OOOcc bikes are exorbitant, the engine size begins to make sense.
The bike generally got good reviews in the 80s, but it's not the perfect machine to convert to a cafe racer. It's a little too big and the suspension is built for touring and less for sport. But it's good enough and should be a fun project if we can figure it out.
Which brings me to the point of this post. My son and I had the initial goal of getting the bike running before we chopped it up and customized it. Supposedly the engine is good, but the previous owner had electrical issues so nothing was working on the bike. I have next to no experience with electrical so this was going to be a big learning curve.
After spinning my wheels trying to figure out the problems with the electrical system for a few weeks of work in the evenings, I read a good post from an actual electrical expert who works on motorcycles. He explained all the wrong ways to diagnose the problem and then he explained the right way, which in hindsight makes total sense. He said to pick one thing and work your way from the battery to the termination point of that component and test each step along the way.
It was this that got me thinking about programming. When you have a particularly nasty bug, it can be overwhelming to try to figure out what's causing it. It can be coming from so many different places. The best way to solve it is to work back to the last time the code was working and slowly re-introduce things that were added after the bug surfaced. You remove the variables in this way just as by focusing on just one electrical component removes all the other variables.
That's all. Thought it was interesting. Got the electrical working again with this process. Now, onto the starter system.