Getting hot and bothered

Image credit gabitzu79

We get used to our bikes letting us know they have a problem when they vomit their guts up over the back tire so when the dash board starts blinking at you, you are faced with a mix of annoyance at a new problem but relief that you aren't pushing a dead bike back home just yet.

The PGM FI unit lets you know it is having bother by leaving the FI light on when the ignition is switched on. To find out the problem you just flick the side stand out and it will blink a code at you in a series of dashes and dots (long and short blinks). The dots are worth 1 and the longer dashes are worth more (I don't have my Haynes manual to hand to give you values, I had a look online and there is allot of bad advice on there from VTEC owners who have a different setup). With this information at hand you can refer to your trusty Haynes manual and pointing you in the general direction of the fault.

I initially misread this error code as an injector not working properly so I fed the bike half a bottle of redex and sprayed some WD40 into all of the injector wiring system plugs. This seemed to solve the problem for a few weeks before it came back; on and off, getting progressively getting more persistent. The bike however was running fine so I wasn't to bothered if I had an injector with communication issues; so long as it worked.

With the FI light now permanently on (a big annoyance at night and might cover a new issue emerging) I took another look at all of the plugs and wiring for the injectors and spotted a chafe on the wiring loom near the headstock. This would explain the progressive failure of the injector I thought and prepared to do a wiring splice. However when I stripped back the loom tape to expose the damaged wire I could see that only the insulation had warn and the wire underneath was in good condition so this couldn't have caused the problem.

Now running out of options bar a broken injector (that seemed to work just fine though) I went back to the beginning to see if I had missed something.
This is where I spotted that I had misread how much a dash was worth. With the correct code at hand I now knew I had a problem with a Lambda sensor.
This was pretty unlikely as I had removed them with the exhaust update and replaced them with resistors so guessing that these had got dirty or fallen out somehow.
To gain access, I popped the side fairing off and removed the tape from the plugs.

When I got the tape off of the plugs I was met with a rather crispy problem. The resistors had over heated and burnt up.
I had used a number of sources to confirm that I was using the correct rating of resistor (330Ohm) so was a bit miffed and confused as to why this had happened.
The eagle eyed among you might have spotted that these are in fact 100 Ohm resistors reading Brown, Black, Black rather than Red, Red, Black that they aught to. All thanks for this has to go to the toss piece at Maplin who handed me these and no small amount of blame to me for not assuming he was stupid.
With this now understood I am now able to go buy the correct resistors and put this problem to bed.