"I had a couple of things that needed repair today.

Last night my headlight was flickering and I had a taillight out in the coffee can. I figured this was time to install a circuit breaker. I looked on the web at the Harley one and they were just 30 amp standard breakers at twice the price. I first ran into these many years ago working in an airplane shop and we called them aircraft circuit breakers then. Later I fitted busses with them and found that others were using them also. Now they are very common in truck and bus use. Most auto parts stores carry them but newer employees have never heard of them. I had to show the local shop what they were and what they do.

There is another type of self re-setting breaker that is readily available that uses spade terminals. I like this type with the screw terminals as I have never had a problem with them. There was also an ideal mount available on the speedo mount screw.

The wiring on this bike was not as good as first inspection would lead you to believe. They used crimp-on connectors in terminal areas with shrink wrap which is common. Wire to wire joints are just wrapped around each other and shrink wrapped. My main power lead came out of the harness at 10 gauge wire and shrunk to 16 gauge where they ran it to a fuse. It got hot with the engine running.

Disconnect the battery as this is the main power lead.

I spliced in a piece of 10 gauge wire to bring it to the breaker and soldered and shrink wrapped all connections. Then I mounted the breaker to the speedo screw. This lets me see how far I want to make my wires run to keep them out of the way and tidy. Use a terminal on the 20 amp breaker connections and if you solder and shrink wrap them you will never have them off again. We ran this type of breaker five million miles in busses and they were good when we scrapped them. Those are a couple of pieces of shrink wrap tube placed on the breaker legs to cut the exposure of hot leads in the headlight shell. They just slide on and are easy to remove for testing if you don’t shrink them.

I checked the article on sockets and unfortunately the NAPA was closed so I could not use the type recommended there.

In the coffee can I used a standard socket for GM and Ford that takes 1157s, they used them from 1970-1980. The number for Motormite at Kragen is 85819. If you straighten the snaps a bit it goes straight in. I added a ground wire as I agree that even though I had a ground through the chassis a separate ground can save trouble. As you can see I drilled and riveted the ground on but I don’t advise this. I only did it because I currently have a small and lame soldering iron. If you use a rivet you have to go to the trouble of making sure it does not interfere with the rubber in the socket which means clipping and fileing. After soldering and shrink wrapping this socket in the next bulb will be easy.

There are only three wires so one of them is going to be ground, one taillight, and one brake light.

Notice the fine method of grounding on the stock installation of wrapping the ground wire around the spring. At least this made it easy to identify ground.

I just did a temporary wire twist on the other two as something this simple is not worth getting a test light out for. Of course I wired it backwards first but now they were identified, so I soldered them together. This made me notice the spring that pulls my brake light switch is inconsistent so I re-bent that. This area is going to need readjusting as the pull is down, not straight. This will wear the brake light switch out early if not fixed.

The flickering headlight turned out to be a crappy socket that does not click the connector in well. I have it working by wire tying it to the bulb but on the next problem it is history. Those connectors are easy to get at any parts store."