Got the card from Fedex asking for an advancement fee of £12 and duties of £32.59 so £44.59 so that they can send me my Chinese LED headlamp.
When I looked into it more closely they had assessed the goods value as $161.03 - and charged 20% VAT on the assessed value.
They also stated that the package weight was 7.9 kg. The box must have been built to keep out Kryptonite.
A terse e mail was sent asking for a realistic assessment of price and weight with firm expectation of a significant reduction.
I still do not have my headlamp though and being over charged £20 to £30 would almost be worth it to have it here so I can finish the bike.
I have spent the last couple of weeks (rather half-heartedly) testing the electrics and the results have been decidedly depressing. I was getting inconsistent results, test one circuit - OK - test another N0 OK - test the first circuit again - no OK - but the second circuit when tested again - OK. Also the M Unit seems to have a latching logic within it so to turn something off (LH indicators for example) you had to go through every possible combination of switch position and turning it on again actually turns it off. I think this is re-settable as the unit is delivered to work with latching pushbuttons but can work with a normal switch. I was always hoping to get all the circuits working before attempting the re-set but with contradictory and somewhat random results from my testing I was getting nowhere.
Today I took a big decision to start again from scratch on the wiring and spent about 4 hours removing the harness, all the tape and all the bits I spent ages designing and making to fit it all together. All scrapped now
I was never happy with the original arrangement - too congested, looked bloody awful, a nightmare to maintain and I suspect likely to be unreliable.
In my head I have designed it. Effectively I have moved the M Unit in front of the steering head in front of the instrument nacelle. I will save 2 connection boxes and by additionally by also rationalising the earth wiring about half the number of wires going around the steering head. The bundle of knitting near the battery will be eliminated. Just got to do it now.
As a footnote just as I was packing up I thought I would test the camera and monitor one more time, first, quite by accident, I discovered my test link wire (2 x crododile clips on about 500mm of wire) was defective (broken internally to the insulation). No wonder all my testing was producing odd results, second when I worked that out I found the link wiring between the camera and the monitor was open circuit.
Its a good job it is not good painting weather as I have about 30 hours of re-wiring to do now.