Turn Signal Switch

[qcbaker]

Hi all. I recently bought an '05 GS500F as my first road bike (been riding dirt bikes for a while, but never on the road until now). The bike is in good condition, minus a few scratches from being tipped over by the previous owner. The only notable exception is that the left turn signals (front and rear) do not work. I have determined it to be the switch. A buddy of mine has the same bike, and his switch feels way different, so what I think happened is that the switch was damaged during a tip over. I have found a few of these available on eBay and stuff, but I just had a couple questions about the installation.

What all is involved with installing this part? It seems like I would just need to take all the fairings off, take the old one off the left handlebar, unplug it from wherever it goes too (flasher relay, i think?), put the new one on, run the wires back to wherever the old one plugged in, and it should be good. However, it kind of looks like the wires go underneath the gas tank. Do I need to take the tank off in order to complete this part swap, or is there enough clearance? If anyone has a video of this being performed or a instruction list, that would be awesome.

I searched the forums a bit before asking and elsewhere on the internet and couldn't find anything, so forgive me if this has been covered elsewhere, because I couldn't find it.

[qcbaker]

So I got a new switch and figured I'd answer my own question, just in case anyone else has this same question.

Replacing the switch is not very difficult at all. All that needs done is to remove the fairings, unscrew and remove the switch from the handlebar, follow the cables down the right side of the bike, and disconnect them from the wiring harness. The connectors are in a tight spot on the right side kind of under the tank, but you do not need to remove the tank to get to them, but you may scrape your hands on stuff if you have bigger hands. Then you just basically do the steps in reverse but with the new switch.

A word of warning though, apparently there are 2 versions: one which includes 2 separate connectors (the turn signals and headlight wires are separated from the clutch sensor wires), and a combined one. The switch that I originally ordered had the incorrect connector and for some reason I didn't think to splice the old connectors onto the new switch until much later, so i ordered a new one with the correct connectors.