wiring harness casualty--?

[Lou]

Confession of a newbie: I spent quite a bit of time in the past few days chasing what I thought was a fuel problem -- my (2008) KLR would simply quit abruptly and refuse to re-start, then after a cool-down period (as I thought) it would fire up again and run flawlessly for a while. I dutifully read the FAQ and got serially irritated at the petcock, the vacuum line from the carb, the float needle, the clean-air valve (who knew?)..., but everything seemed to check out okay. I eventually began to suspect that it wasn't a fuel issue after all ... might be one of those pesky electrical problems I've heard about. So after wiggling all the wires on the clutch housing and the side stand, without result, ... I tried turning the handlebars back and forth while the bike was running. I found that I could reliably kill the ignition just by turning the handlebars through the straight-ahead position, and just as reliably fire it up again as soon as they were turned hard left or hard right. So I think I'm a new Statistic in the Wiring Harness discussion. Hmmm ... if I'd been paying more attention to what y'all have been saying about the wiring-harness recall, perhaps I would have tried this when the bike quit in the first place. Lou Maine 2008 green KLR