Here's where the harness rubbed the tank (left anterior view):
And here's a view of where the wire harness contacted the tank:
While at first, it looked like things wouldn't be too bad to fix, on closer inspection, it got worse:
And worse still:
You can see that the insulation is completely melted off of at least one of the wires and that the heat from that melted the insulation of adjoining wires compounding the problem. At this point, I can't tell what the the shorted wire was connected to since I can't tell it's color. Obviously, the circuit supported by that wire is unfused (there are no blown fuses in the box) - kind of poor design. So the working theory is that somewhere along the line, the wire controlling the left fuel injector was bared and pressed against another bared wire, opening the injector. The odd thing is that the wire with the power must always be hot (not controlled by the ignition switch) since the fuel drained while the bike was parked.
At this point, I'm not sure how many wires are involved and will have to strip off the tape and sleeving from most of the harness to find out. Then I'll have to make a decision to either run new wires or replace the whole harness. There are not presently any used harnesses at Beemer Boneyard and I can only imagine that a new one will be north of a grand.
While this is admidtedly a rare problem, it is one that could easily have been avoided by either running the wire harness differently (or covering it with something more robust) or fusing the circuit. The one bit of good luck here is that this didn't happen on the road - looking at the condition of the wires, it's hard to imagine how things didn't fail much earlier.
I would urge everyone to take a quick look under the tank and make sure that your harness is not rubbing. To prevent it from doing so in the future, either reroute the harness slightly or put additional insulation on the underside of the tank.
Charlie
After conferring with Cycle Rob,
