Breakdown

Well crap! We have spent the last 3 weekends working on the house, replacing trim, painting, etc. and haven't done much riding outside of my work commute. We took a very short ride one morning to The Porch restaurant in Burleson, TX to get breakfast before we started working but that's been all. I had planned a decent ride for last Sunday but when we got up neither of us had the energy to go. Between our regular work and the added work on weekends on the house in the heat our bodies simply said "Your not going anywhere buddy". So we did absolutely nothing to give our bodies a break. I spent most of the day playing Eve Online, yes, I am a MMORPG gamer and have been for over a decade. It kind of goes along with my IT background. 

We were planning on riding this weekend but then, disaster occurred. While riding to work Wednesday I noticed my speedometer and tachometer lights were flickering. I ride every morning in the dark so the flickering was very noticeable. Great, whats going on here? At first it was just a few little flickers on and off, but as the commute progressed the flickering became very pronounced and everything that is powered on both gauges were also losing power. I asked Margaret to set up an appointment at Fort Worth Harley to have it looked at. Without an appointment your bike might sit there a few days until they have time to work it in. I was supposed to drop it off Thursday evening but on the way home it got even worse. In the daylight I wasn't able to see the lights flickering to know how bad it was. I didn't need to though because half way home the indicators started flopping around and finally went dead. No power to both speedometer or tachometer. The odometer wasn't even displaying anything. Apparently both gauges are on the same power feed that had gone out. I pulled over and called Margaret to meet me at the dealership because I was going to go ahead and drop it off instead of waiting.

Late Friday Nick from service calls and gave me the good news and the bad news. The good news was they promptly found the problem. The speedometer had gone out. Dead. The tach went out because the power feeds through the speedo first and then the tach. Easy enough to replace. A wire connection and a few screws. The bad news was they had to submit the warranty information and order the part. It was too late to do that on Friday so he won't be able to order it until Monday. Nick also needed my mileage so they could program the new speedometer with the current mileage. I had just done an oil change at 52,500 and had ridden some since doing it so we decided to have it set at 53,000.

Fortunately I had made the decision to purchased a 4 year extended service plan. I talked a bit about that in the Loco Coyote post and video. An electrical issue is one of those breakdowns that I don't want any part of trying to troubleshoot and repair. It was for this exact type of breakdown that I purchased that extended warranty. This will cost $50 which is the deductable. This single problem alone will end up paying for my first year of the extended service plan. So this weekend we didn't ride again due to my bikes issue. Again we worked on the house and got a little bit more done...