12 March, 2012

Bike Wiring

So today I embarked on the adventure of wiring up the bike. I've been putting this off as long as possible. Why? Well simply put I was scared.

With the help of Mark Small, Google and the courage brought on by a true Aussie beer I was able to achieve the most likely doable by a one arm monkey.

Achieved:

  • GPS charging wired into key switched line.
  • Fuse block, ( Things I can wire even more into. ) Involves tapping a key switched line, & running long lead from main fuse panel.
  • Fused 7.5amp Battery tap with SAE connector for things like air pump and boasting/chargeing batter.
  • Dualy D2 Lights, Mounted these on the crash bars.

Some shots of the achievement

I'm basically using the GPS charger socket to do two things.
  • Actually hook up a GPS charger
  • Provide a keyed single wire that I can feed to a fuse block.
By tapping this BMW accessory port I don't have to modify a single thing about the electrics of the bike. I use the 12 volt line from the GPS charger as the signal to enable the switch block.

Note: BMW are great engineers. However it appears the design of the battery location and access to it was design by one of The Three Stooges.

This is the left hand side of the bike with the fairing removed. This appears to be the main fuse block for the bike. So I'm using this as a form of battery tap. If I have stuffed this up I've made sure I have enough spare line tucked in the bike to move it up to the batter. Now I also made sure I used proper 15amp automotive power cable.
So here is where I put the fuse block. Just at the rear of the bike under the seat just on top of the wheel well. On the left hand side is the inputs. They are: Ground, Signal, +12v. It's at this point I elegantly spliced of the Ground & +12v to a SAE water proof plug. Now I have a point to attach battery chargers, air pumps or any other thing that needs direct access to the battery.

I have also attached my first item on the fuse block. A set of Dually D2 lights. Burned out a 5amp fuse right away so went up to 10amp. Note this fuse block allows me to have switched power or direct to battery it all depends on how I put the fuse in the block. Really nice feature.

This is how I passed the lines through the centre of the bike. This is actually harder than it looks. Trying to figure out how to run the lines so they don't rub on something sharp, get in the way of parts and some how be arranged so I don't sit there going. "What the F#@K is this line?"
Here we see the line from the light switch to the lights. The other lines in the shot are yellow signal, a battery supply line & the return from the fuse block that leads to the light switch. Top left you can see a big bundle of wire. This is the spare wire from the light switch.

Now in one piece

Damn that's a good looking bike.

So here we see the fairings back on. The lights mounted. We can see a few other mods. A few! The seat is new as well and it just works I think.


Finally the Lights

If these things don't blind ever kangaroo in the state then I don't know what will. So I don't know of any one else that has these on a bike. I'd love to hear from people that have also mounted them.

My poor mate Mark on the next equipment test run. He has to stand at distance and see how blind he gets when I decide to align them better.

06 March, 2012

Interesting Weather

Interesting Weather

So I'm about to start this adventure but there is a itsy bitsy small issue. A very big chunk of land around Sydney is flooding at the moment. Wasn't planning on water wings for the bike.

Might have a slight delay to the start of the adventure. Or I might just have to invest in some more mods for the bike.

Getting Ready! The bike and everything else.

Trip Preparation for the Bike

The trip has been a long time in the making. Myself and google have been very good friends over the course of the last year as I research ever possible angle of the trip. One of the question I've been asked a lot about is what did I do to the bike. Well quite a bit actually.

First off I started off with a base model 2011 BMW F800GS.

Along with the bike is a lot of other stuff. I have tried to choose everything very carefully. I've inevitably over planned. I've sorta planned to stop at some point and ship a ton of stuff back home to lighten the load.

Now I'm trying to be good about making sure I have links to everything. If a link is broken or bad let me know in comments.

BMW Options list:

From the BMW Equipment List
  • Aluminium pannier, Side and Top
  • Hand Guards
The reason for the BMW pannier system was the additional mounts on the cases. I can mount extra bags on top of each cases. Fully attached to the cases not to the body of the bike. Which means I take the case off the bike in one motion I take an extra bag as well. I can also get into the box without having to undo everything. Very few pannier systems allow for this.

After Market list:

Cloths:

tbd

Gadgets:

tbd

Misc, Camping, First Aid:

tbd