The best-laid schemes...

Robert Burns wrote,

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men 

Gang aft agley,

An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,

For promis'd joy!

And so it goes with my pride and joy tail lights. After riding with a friend, I did a quick check of the tail light functioning: running light, turns, stop lights, etc., and found that the center (LED) running light was not on, however the brake lights worked fine (both signals lights are wired to brighten on stop along with the center brake), as well as the running lights in the turns housing.

Huh, must be bad bulb, so I changed it out to a regular bulb and sure enough, no running light and in fact, no stop light, and the turns were light up solid like the brake was on. I suspected a bad ground so broke out the meter and sure enough the ground on the center socket was "open".

Sad bunny. I had to open up my entire wiring harness to give enough relief to pull the socket out of the housing to solder the ground back on. This involved a complete tear down of the rear fender to get to the wiring harness, etc. Enjoy the glorious mess.

I'm glad to report it's all fixed. Everything came out in the end. I hope this is not a repeated process. I'm starting to rethink my rear light system. At some future incarnation, I may just go for two turns wired as stop lights like I presently have with the three light solution. Live and learn.