Paul’s KTM 950 Adventure

Paul inherited this old KTM from his uncle, and wanted to bring it back to full fitness.

The ignition switch was iffy, and it looked like the fuse box had started giving up. At any rate, two of the fuses had been bypassed with monster wire and giant connectors. He wanted a new ignition switch and a health check. Paul reported that it all worked, so there was nothing drastic.

The first time you see a bike like this you don’t really how big the job might be. So you let it tell you. Pulling off the bodywork I could see lots of winter salt corrosion, and the main feed to the loom in an exposed position. So it made sense to pull these plugs apart and clean up the terminals. I put them back with lots of silicone grease. I tried measuring the resistance between the main battery earth lead at the front, and the tail light earth at the other end of the bike. 4-6 ohms. That’s quite a lot. A new loom would be zero.

Once I hacked the old fuse box off I could see why. Blackened copper strands in the cables. In an ideal world, you’d make a new loom. But on a bike like this it would be a ton of money, so I focused on making things just good enough. Even on old strands you can make a good connection to new cable if you have a decent range of crimps and crimp tools.

So the fuse box and terminals got replaced with new, joined to the loom by a series of bullets and direct connections. I was dreading replacing the ignition switch because KTM use anti-tamper screws. Fortunately I noticed I could just replace the bottom half of the switch – the bit with the contacts and wires in it. The top half was just the lock barrel. House of pain averted.

It worked – everything lit up as expected when I hooked up a slave battery and turned it on.

I did a diagram for the fuse box because KTM’s diagram isn’t great, and I don’t like making mistakes.

Paul has a few jobs to do before he can MOT the bike and start using it. With a bit if luck, it’ll be trouble free for a few years yet.