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Electrical

12/31/06 - Wiring hell...

A project that must be done, but I was not anticipating was wiring the car.  It could be much worse...I could be making the car street legal, which would require much more work.  It is really not all that bad, it is just slow and tedious work, and I make no claims to be an electrical whiz.  After digging into it, I was pleasantly surprised to find that extensive modification of the standard bike harness was not required. 

Basically, I started with the master wiring diagram and labeled all the connections on the harness to better understand how the routing needed to go.  Then the entire harness was unwrapped to expose the individual wires.  Then I was able to pull back some of the circuits and re-route them in a more favorable manner for my layout.  Next I had to ground out some of the switches, and install a resistor or two to fool the dash lights.  Everything is still in process, but in the end, the wiring harness will end up being very neat and tidy.  I am finding that spiral wrap is my best friend right now.

The rear harness was made and it includes wires for the tail lights and for the fuel pump.  Nothing real fancy here.  Some handy anchors were found to securely mount all the bundles to the frame.

The battery box was made from aluminum.  A couple of hold down tabs were made for each side which allows the factory battery hold down strap to be used.  It is nice to have the motorcycle engine setup in this case.  The maintenance free gel battery was only $55, and it only weighs 11 lbs.

The upper dash panel was also finished.  Basically it needed the two gauges (oil pressure and water temperature) installed along with the master kill switch.  Then it got covered with the same carbon fiber decal material as the rest of the interior panels.  I was looking forward to getting this done because it really makes the interior start to look complete.

1/14/07 - Emerging from Wiring Hell

Well, short of hooking up a couple senders on the engine, the wiring is now finished.  I am no great electrician, but things ended up fairly neat and tidy.  The under dash is a little messy, but everything is tied down.  Most of the problem is from having a little extra wire in some of the harness.  Things forward of the firewall came out pretty tidy.  All the wires are anchored along the way and are not just flopping around.  The spiral wrap really helped to neaten things up and make it as compact as possible.

The R1 instrument cluster has been mounted also.  A bracket was made that uses the OEM mounting grommets for attachment.  You can see what it will look like from the driver's view.