Kill Switch Surprise

[GaryIF]

I found myself stranded today, my bike having died without cause.  It just shut down as though someone "unplugged" it.  I pushed it to a side street (thank goodness the GS500 is light!), put it up on its center stand, then proceeded to study every wire visible to figure out what happened.

Everything looked pristine (it's a very clean 2001).  Main fuse was fine; all the wires looked fine; the tank was half full.  Press the start switch and nothing; as if there were no battery (but the lights worked fine).

After 20 minutes and AAA only a few minutes away, there was my answer -- the ignition kill switch was flipped.  Somehow, and I still can't figure out what my hands were doing when it happened, I hit the red switch while I was riding.

Whew!  Sometimes the answer's staring ya' right in the face.  Happy ending.

[GRU]

sometimes it's best to NOT know anything....if you didn't know anything about the wires and so on, you would have checked the kill switch right away and found the problem...

i quess it's just because when something happens, we always think that it's something serious so we check the big things...

one day i was riding and just before my building is a street with a 70 km/h speed limit....i reved my gs to redline and the bike started to slow down and lose power.....my first quess was that something was wrong with the carbs because i rejetted them...so i finaly got home and the next day i started the bike without any problems...then i started riding and the same thing happend...i was so mad i almost put the bike in the ditch beside the road.......

quess what was the problem!!!
no fuel  :lol:

[JeffD]

Yeah that Kill switch got me once.  I used to have a disc lock that I hung off of my right side mirror.   I was taking off and hit a bump,  the disc lock bounced around and flipped my kill switch as Im in the middle of traffic.  I rolled to the side of the road and just flipped it back (once I saw it) and took off.     Scared the sh~t out of me.  

[powrful1]

I was a former kill switch sucker.  I hit it about a month ago when I was wearing heavy gear and looked exactly at it first.....   2 Seconds later everything was fine.

[Shadowhawk]

I ran into a similar prob. today.  I let a little kid sit on my bike(his mother put him there) because he could not take his eyes off of it .  He fiddled with things, and when she pulled him off(yes, pulled, he had no interest in getting off), I put in the key, hit the starter, and nothing.........  Ok, KISS is the rule, good battery, has gas, OH, Ok, he fliped the kill switch.  Flip it over, and off I went.

Don
'83 GS450LD