I live in a part of Italy where almost every road which isn’t part of the Autostrada system is a great ride. In addition, my local area is dotted with tiny old villages and each of them has its own historic interest, a nifty bar, or a great little eatery of some kind. They’re just waiting for me to discover them, but most of them are off the beaten path. I’ve lived here for less than 2 years, so I don’t know the roads all that well. And I admit to having to rely on my GPS to get home from a “follow my nose” exploration trip in my car on more than one occasion.
Now that I’ve got a Monster 696, I realize a GPS might sometimes be a handy thing to have, even if real touring is not a strong point of the bike nor is it high on my list of interests. I already own a Garmin Nuvi GPS unit for my car. Mounting it on my bike seemed like a natural thing to do. Of course, unlike a real touring bike, there isn’t much room in the handlebar and instrument panel area of a Monster. After mounting a Bitubo steering damper, there is even less. That, and my desire to have a neat looking instillation, required a bit of thought and planning.
If you have an interest in something similar, do this:
Purchase an inexpensive bicycle/motorcycle mount. I got mine from Amazon.uk. It was specific to my Garmin; i.e. it had a clamp designed to attach to a handle bar and ended in the ubiquitous Garmin swivel ball so that my existing unit could simply be unclipped from my car mount and snapped onto my bike. Google is your friend.
While you’re at it, buy a cigarette plug style power supply. Again, mine came from Amazon.uk. Of course both the mount and power supply should be appropriate for your GPS.
I didn’t want a female cigarette lighter plug flopping around on the end of a wire. That’s so amateurish. So I hard wired the power supply like this: First remove the cover from the cigarette plug end of the power supply cord and you will find a little voltage regulator which changes 12 volts into the 5 volts required by the GPS. Hint: Do not zap your GPS with 12 volts.
Remove the head lamp by following the instructions in the downloadable Ducati shop manual. Hint: Don’t drop the headlamp! Locate the wire bundle entering the headlamp housing via a rubber sealing plug. Take note of how the positive 5 V and negative ground wires connecting the GPS to the tiny circuit board are wired and then cut them off so you can feed the wire into the headlight housing through the existing rubber plug.
Slide the plug out of the headlight housing, but leave the existing wires intact. Using a drill the same size as the wire, carefully (VERY carefully) drill an access hole through the rubber sealing plug alongside the existing headlight wires. You MUST use a variable speed drill at the slowest possible speed and be careful not to do the “spaghetti twisting on a fork” stunt. You’ll regret it if you do. Then feed the GPS wire in through the plug and carefully re-solder the two wires back to the circuit board like they were before. Don’t switch the polarity and don’t trust the color coding of anything assembled by a 9 year old Chinese kid.
Now for the input power. Connect the wires that feed 12 volts to the circuit board (positive and ground) to an appropriate source. Again, don’t trust the Chinese color coding. Hint: The center-pin of the cigarette plug is positive and the side-contact is ground. I chose to connect to the positive (yellow) and negative (black) wires which feed the parking light. That way the GPS will go on and off with the bike key but I have the option to keep it powered from the bike battery along with just the parking lamp if I wish.
Use some common-sense so that you don’t short out anything either now or in the future after things vibrate and bounce around for a while. I used a little plastic bag and some electrical tape to insulate and partially waterproof the circuit board as well as a few small sized wire ties to secure the voltage regulator and tidy everything up inside the headlight assembly. The interior of the head lamp housing is supposed to remain dry, but you should use care anyhow. Don’t be sloppy at this stage and you’ll be OK. Hint: You’ll need a small soldering iron and an ability to work with the rather small wires typically found on cheap circuit boards. Because the voltage regulator tucked into a typical cigarette lighter plug is very cheaply made and the wires associated with a mini-USB port are very small, this work will require some basic soldering skills. First timers might consider asking for help. In any case, follow good electrical practices to make and properly insulate all of the required connections and protect them from vibration and chafe too.
Before you button everything up, turn on the key and make sure your parking lamp still comes on and that you actually get power to your GPS. Then shake the wires around a little bit. If everything is OK, close up the headlamp and put the components back in their proper place.
Feed the GPS power wire up to near where the mount will go. Did you leave yourself enough slack? Initially, I put the clamp and mount on the right handle bar. The fit is very tight and in order to keep the clamp or GPS unit from hitting the fuel tank or anything else it had to be adjusted so that the GPS was positioned so that the screen was lying flat; i.e. facing nearly straight up. It was OK in the shop but once I got out on the road I found it impossible to read the screen because of the reflection from the sky. It also vibrated quite a bit. Back to the drawing board for me, but if you don’t have a top mounted steering damper you may find room on the bar.
Further study showed that the clamp would fit perfectly on the right hand end of my Bitubo steering damper. In this position the GPS unit can be adjusted on its swivel-ball to a near vertical position which will allow reading the screen, even in bright sunlight. It is sufficiently protected by the small windscreen of the Monster “Plus” version so that it doesn’t shake or blow off; however, because of the winter weather I have not yet tested it above about 130 kph. Without any kind of windscreen protecting the unit I might be concerned about wind tearing the unit off the mount at very high speeds. I’ll leave it to you to experiment.
Of course, it goes without saying that you don’t want the mount or the wire or the GPS itself to interfere with movement of the steering or the operation of the steering damper. Neither do you want it to scratch the tank at full lock, right and left. You’re almost ready for a functional test, but please use any remaining common sense to check everything carefully before you get out on the road. Motorcycles are dangerous enough without doing something silly to jam your steering.
My relatively cheap GPS is not waterproof, but it snaps right off if rain threatens or to prevent theft. Since my mount is put on with a thumb screw, it too can be quickly removed and the wire tucked away if, for instance, you’re riding local roads or if your friends tease you about converting your Monster into a Gold Wing.
IMG_5120.jpg by
Mozella, on Flickr
IMG_5125.jpg by
Mozella, on Flickr
