How to remove your
Reserve Lighting Unit
and still have proper headlight operation
Yamaha included a silly device called a Reserve Lighting Unit that will automatically switch your headlight to Hi-beam if your lo-beam burns out. It also lights up an idiot light to tell you that your headlight is out. If this unit fails you won't have either lo-beam or hi-beam and your idiot light won't even work - far more dangerous, in my opinion, than having a headlight burn out and much harder to locate a replacement.
Just disconnect the unit and toss it somewhere. Look at the connector in the wiring harness and find the blue/black and blue/yellow wires. Strip a small section of insulation from those two wires and twist them together and solder. Or, if you are serious about this, just cut the wires right off the connector and splice the blue/black to the blue/yellow. Now you have headlights again.
UPDATE 6/21/2000 - by Keith Brown
Hello Blaine, an update to the removal of the reserve lighting unit: On my venture, the removal resulted in the hi beam indicator not operating. No problem, and the remedy is easy: The indicator for the high beam has two wires coming from it, a r/y and y. (red/yellow and yellow) the r/y goes to a 9 pin plug. The yellow goes to the connector where the RSU was. The easiest fix is: before cutting the rest of the wires from the connector (other than the ones you are going to short together to bypass the RSU), connect the yellow/green to the yellow ( I built a jumper from the old wires). Then remove the r/y wire on the lamp side of the 9 pin connector, and connect it to the black wire in the middle of the 9 pin connector. (Ground). Originally, the yellow wire was pulled low by the RSU to indicate high beam. If you are very technical, you could build a transistor switch (called an invertor) to do the same, but the wire fix is simple enough. The indicator is actually a bit brighter than the original. BTW, the Venture Royale has a 'computer monitor' that also tells you if your headlight is burned out...duh. (Here's a neat trick; if you turn the headlight on and it don't work, it's broke...) Keith