So a while back I equipped my bike with a set of really nice microswitches to replace the ugly, stock "chicken-head" handlebar controls as well as clean up the visible wiring going to them.
The downside was that while the controls looked great, and the visible wires were very clean, the resulting relays and connections into the stock wiring harness were... a mess at best.
So, I finally decided it was time to clean up this blight and vastly simplify my bike's wiring harness by getting a hold of one of these nifty little boxes from MotoGadget:
Basically, it's an all-in-one fuse and control unit that works with very small currents (like the kind microswitches carry)
And it handles turning on and off various lights and accessories on your bike by supplying them directly with current, rather than running the current through a switch (more info can be found here:
http://www.motogadget.de/en/m_unit.html)
So I went out and ordered one of these from Spiegler USA, and also 'appropriated' one of the giant printers at work to make myself a 5 x 3 cheat sheet.
So armed with this, a multimeter, a really good set of wire cutter/strippers and a good soldiering iron, I set off to redo my bike's wiring.
Initially I was scared as hell, but Duck Stew had encouraged me in the past by basically telling me I'd be fine, and to "just start cutting."
However, rather than "just start cutting" I worked with the cheat sheet and made a few annotations. Basically I figured out how to wire up the circuits I needed with the box.
It turns out I'd still need a few fuses in place, as well as one relay. All this because a) the power demands of all the FI systems (fuel pump as well as ECU & ignition)
just might be more than the box could handle and b) It turns out the ECU controls some of the power to these circuits.
Basically, as cool as the box was, it couldn't quite handle everything.
So once everything was planned, I started cutting off all the protective sleeves from the wiring harness, and freeing up all the wires that I could. In cases where the wires were too tangled up to get them separated, I simply went in and cut them.
So it wasn't long before I was looking at this
And this:
And this:
Now normally this would seem like a hard problem to deal with, but luckily I had a bottle of this handy:
In all seriousness, it wasn't that bad once I'd planned out the additional circuit to handle the ignition and wired that up. That was easily 2/3 of the project. Mostly it was a matter of meticulously mapping out the needed circuits, double checking the design and then doing a "first pass" where all the wires are connected (messily) and confirming that that the bike starts and runs correctly.
Once the whole set up passed it's "dry run", with the bike running, I went through and cleaned up and shortened the various wires, working one at a time, cutting, soldering and taping. That part went relatively quickly (mostly because I wasn't constantly going "is that a red-blue or a red purple wire?")
A second 'run' to confirm it still worked, and a quick set of waterproof wrapping and I was done.
And without too much work I ended up with this:
Well, if "done" means a running bike with no instrumentation or lighting
Still, lights, brakes and the instrument panel is all stuff I've all wired before and is vastly simpler than what I just did. Still, I won't breathe a sigh of relief until that part's finished.
And while I suppose I could have posted about this while the project was underway, I realized I wasn't going to fess up about this project until I actually got the motor running.
If this had failed spectacularly I would have quietly posted up "Need a new wiring harness" on some dark corner of the internet, far away from this place
