wiring gremlins = Ducati
I spend 2 days cutting, extending and tucking the entire wiring harness for the bike. Since the ECU, VRM, coils, fuse box and relays all have been drastically relocated, the harness was never going to lay out in stock form.
Every wire was painstakingly soldered and double shrinkwrapped, and taped up tight. Gave it power, lights came on hit the starter, nothing… fuel pump wasnt turning on either. Eric and I spend many hours, un wrapping it all again, and hunting the issues down. First the starter “contactor” Ducati calls it wasnt receiving a ground to the relay, key on was 12 volts on one nothing on the other, starter button fed it 12 v on BOTH wires… thats not going to make a relay move! Fuel pump was also getting 12V on a wire that was supposed to be a ground. Traced them back on the diagram, and they seem to be switching grounds inside the “injector controller”, or the ECU if you dont talk Ducati. Every pinout and wire point A to B on the rest of the harness we checked one by one and they are all 100% perfect… we put the eggs in the bad ecu basket. Probably got jostled around for 5 months and broke something inside.
New ECU is $1495.99 from Ducati!!!
or $150 on ebay. lol
New ecu was put in, with the questioned ground/12v wires for the starter and pump disconnected. Multimeter now showed the fuel pump had a proper ground but the starter was now only showing 8V on the ground button depressed. thats odd, there is a diode thats questionable so that was snipped out. The 12V feed from the starter button was left intact, the wire from the ECU that was supposed to be a switching ground was clipped and tucked away not to be used. Thats a DUMB design too, just asking to fry an ecu from a back feeding busted solenoid if that 3 cent diode failed (which could have been what took out the first ecu).
Needless to say, now the starting circuit is like a simple lawn tractor, and works perfectly, and more importantly isolates the expensive ass ecu away from the only issue with the wiring we had.
So, last night i put fresh fuel in the tank, connected the lines and put the tank on a stand next to it. Choked it hit the button and it fired right up! Choke off, even cold, it idled like a champ and had instant throttle response!
Big load off my shoulders, and finally we can get check one more project off the list soon, and more importantly reclaim floor and shelf space!!!
Lighting, digital gauge cluster swap, and some sort of exhaust and this will be rideable again!
rofl:rofl
