Pottering in the shed

Over the last few weeks little packages have been arriving from all over the place (the US, Japan and NZ) but I've had to wait for them all to arrive before diving in and sticking them on the DL.

First up was a stebel - I love the one on the Connie and the standard horn on the DL was pathetic. I got the horn locally from Fast Bike Gear but it also meant that I needed a mount from Twisted Throttle and a plug and play harness from Eastern Beaver (the single horn relay kit). After removing a fair bit of plastic I got the mount and the horn on and then had to find the

stock horn so I could pull the wires and plug into the harness.

This proved to be a bit tricky - where was the damn thing? I tooted the horn and listened from both sides but could still not pick it's position. There was nothing for it but to fire up the laptop and check Stromtrooper.com for some assistance. Well, it turns out that the horn is tucked in behind the radiator and it was a bit of a mission to get at and then plug the wires into the harness but we got there in the end. Finishing the job simply required me to hook the harness to both the stebel and the battery, finding a place to stash the relay and that was it - turn the key on and a quick toot confirmed all was good.

Next up was something pretty daunting for me as I'm not an electrical expert at all - it was to install a fuse box from Eastern Beaver so that I could run all my other doo-dads of it. This fuse box would give me 7 fused circuits to use: two hot all the time and 5 that only work once the key is on. Installing the fuse box was actually quite easy with the only difficult thing being finding the brake light connector (under the tank) which plugs into the special harness that came with the fuse box and provides the switched power to the fuse box.

Once the fuse box was set up I plugged in the wires for my electrical doo-dads and then tidied up the wires and velcroed the fuse box to the bike.

The next job was to fit some Oxford heated grips and as this was my second time around for this job, this went pretty well. The only difficult part is trying to run the wiring and keep it tidy. The grips were wired into one of the switched circuits of the fuse box and then I was able to check that I had actually installed the fuse box properly. Warm grips equalled success!

Righto, now we're getting somewhere, time for the next task - a GPS mount from Twisted throttle so that I could also use my Zumo on the DL. Also attached to this mount was a Garmin cradle to hold the GPS and provide power to the GPS.

The mount is a nice piece of kit and is also designed to reduce vibration from the bike and mounts very neatly underneath the windscreen using it's mounting holes. I was also able to route the power cable and a stereo cable (to plug my helmet speakers into the GPS) back through a couple of gaps so that things were kept tidy.

The GPS was then wired into the fuse box via one of the always hot circuits. I want it like this so that it can be left on during stops so it continues to record data and doesn't take time to start up each time.

Finally it was time for one last job before putting everything back

together -

wire up an accessory

socket. The bike came with an accessory socket mounted in the left hand side fairing but the previous owner had never bothered to wire it up. This was as easy as running some wires from the socket to the fuse box - once again using a switched circuit.

Job done, I tested the socket with my little 12v compressor (success again) and then finished my day's farkling by tiding up all the wiring and putting the bike back together.

I ended up putting quite a few hours into all this but I'm very happy that everything went well and all the farkles work! I also enjoyed myself and probably learned a few things about how the bike is nailed together and how things work...

Now to place a few more orders...