I was changing the battery and accidently stuck one of the ground wires on the hot post. It was a hot day, I was late for work, the battery had just died (after about 4000 miles on a new charging system and a 2600 mile trip) and the kid at the scooter shop was being a prick about loaning me a screwdriver when I'm broke down in his parking lot and buying a battery from him. And, uh...oh yeah, the heat. It was the heat. So I hook my battery up backwards and yellow smoke starts pouring out and I'm batting at it with the screwdriver trying to break the connection. So I get the wire free and hook it up right and it worked. For about 4 years and 50,000 miles. Now I got the wiring harness out and it's pretty amazing. A whole lot of wires had burned off their insulation and were just bare coroding strands running through the sticky burnt insulation mess inside the harness. I think what finally did me in was actually the broken connector going to the coils that left the connections exposed and covered in oil, which had nothing to do with the burnt up state of the harness. Things were just shorting randomly. This thing could've stranded me so many places so many times so far from home with no money. There could be worse places to work on it than the parking lot at work I guess.