While I love my new Trail 90, there are bound to be things wrong with a 37 year old bike. One of the small things that was not working when I bought the bike was the tail light.

A few days after bringing the bike home I started troubleshooting the light problem. My first guess was a blown bulb, but a replacement did no good. While fiddling with it I noticed that when I hit the brakes with the lights off the tail light would sometimes flicker on. After taking off the light assembly I quickly saw what the problem was. The green ground wire was not connected to anything. Thus when the lights were off the brake light would come on because the tail light wire was acting as a ground.

Once I grounded it and got it back together the light worked perfectly!

The next problem to tackle is to look at why the brake light is not triggered by the front brake. My guess is that the switch inside the handle bars is the culprit. Who knows though, I may find that something else is the cause. One of the fun things about these bike is that they are fairly straight forward to work on, even for a complete beginner like me.