Its going to be cold in the morning for my ride to coffee so I thought I should make sure my heated gear is working.
I have a Girbing vest about 5 years old, it gets a lot of use as I ride year around even if its just once a week to coffee with the the guys in the club.
The gloves were only working on an intermittent basis, one or both would cut out and the vest didn't seem to be putting out a lot of heat.
I pulled on the cable going to each cuff, you can work about 2 feet of cable out and sure enough all four wires were broken where they flex at the elbows, the break was typical of work hardened copper, pulling on the wires the insulation stretched like a rubber band. This is not the first time they have broken, last time I just shortened them a few inches and spliced back together, this time I replaced the wires with some single #18 back past the elbow. I have a different arrangement on my vest with the glove connectors mounted on a printed circuit but it would be easy to replace the cuff cables using one of the Girbing glove cables.
I also found that the cable connected to the bike was intermittent, the negative was broken off under the plastic so it would lose contact if pulled the wrong way.
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I have attached a sketch of the Girbing vest wiring showing how the two circuits can be combined to operate as a single circuit.
I also show a little test box I made as a troubleshooting aid. It has a Male and Female connector so it can be hooked up at any point in the wiring.
A small 12 Volt lamp lets you know if the power is present.
An an old headlamp bulb in series indicates current is flowing, its a 60 Watt lamp so its running about 50% when its in series with the vest and barely glows for just the gloves.
The little test box is worth its weight in gold, its much easier to use than a multimeter as it has all the right connectors.
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I'm sure most of you have dual channel controllers for your heated gear, I have a dual channel Bluetooth but its permanently installed o my V7III when I use the gear on the Convert or my Old Eldorado I just run flat out and turn it off once I get warm enough. If I plug the test box into a Girbing controller it will show the pulse length proportional to the setting.
