How all the farkles were wired?

In this article I try to open up my electrical connections and how I did all of them - twice all over in fact.

I started adding things to my bike like many people do. I took power straight from the battery or found some factory connections for the navigator, for instance . After two years I ran into problems. I lost the track of the various cables. Right after you have installed your gadgets you remember that this "blue cable" is for my reversing sensors and this "green one" is for the extra power in the trunk etc.
But after couple of months or a year you don't remember any more what those cables were for.
I used a lot of in-line fuses which are easy and fast to install but can be a pain to access on the road.

So I figured that this is not a long term solution and change has to take place:

- I needed a central power supply that is connected to the battery and the connections to the bike factory electricals must be kept to minimum.
- I needed fuse blocks with at least 15 fuses that can be accessed without pulling the bike apart.
- I start using relays with all my extra gadgets.
- I needed a systematic coding of all my added cables, relays, junction points etc plus proper drawings. Some day the bike might have a second owner (which will not be in any time soon) and nobody will touch the bike with a shorter than 2 meter stick if the changes are not documented.

The power supply:

The power supply to all my added farkles is here. It is a 80 A main relay that is fed directly from the battery via 10 mm2 cable and from the relay I pulled two separate 6 mm2 cables onward. One to my front fuse block and the other for my rear fuse block.
There is a nice installation place for the relay under the "shelf" right above the rear spring.

Here is another picture of the main relay and it also shows my rear fuse block. This picture is from the beginning of my project judging from the missing second fuse block and still the rear spring preload adjuster in it's original location...

This main relay is triggered by a push button on my handlebar. I have built a separate "holding circuit" for this main relay (with a help from an other relay) and the pilot current taken from the bike's dash light positive lead. This way I can start the bike with the "factory settings" and it runs normally with the standard lights, turn signals etc and all my extras come on only after I push the button in the handlebar.

The "extra gadgets on" -button is the second one from the right. (The extra four-way button adjusts the seat up-down and backrest front-back.)

The fuse blocks:

I figured the fuse blocks needed to be compact in size and preferably use the same mini-size fuses as my facelift LT was also using. I located the fuse blocks from a "Biltema" store but some years later I realized that unfortunately they don't carry these any more.
I currently have three fuse blocks. One for ten fuses in the front under the high beam. One for six fuses under the rider's seat and one for four unswitched (directly from the battery) fuses as well under the seat.

The rear fuse blocks:

This shows the two rear fuse blocks. The smaller one with four fuses is for the few unswitched items I have on the bike, like lights in the sidecases, or lights under the seat or power feed to my Tramigo unit which tells me where my bike is located and if it would be stolen I could kill the fuel pump with a SMS. The Tramigo unit has it's own battery for three to  four days so if I leave the bike standing without a battery charger I can cut the draw from the bike battery and avoid having a starting problem due to this.
This picture also shows my seat lifting mechanism and the Baehr Capo II bike to bike PMR radio located on top of the battery.

The front fuse block:

This shows the front fuse block in place. The installation height is quite critical which is very easy to misjudge when the bike is standing on the centerstand. The steering damper comes actually very close when the bike is standing on it's wheels let alone the case when the front suspension goes down...

This shows how the fuse block was installed with the help of perforated steel band which was used as brackets. The infeed cable is the heavy one that goes in from the front side. This also shows how the 9 tabs from the infeed side of the fuse block were trimmed off. 

This shows the fuse block. The only bad thing is that it is not designed for one common infeed but instead it has the connection tabs on both sides.

...so I had to solder the infeed side of the fuse block together. After taking this picture I trimmed the infeed tabs off and left only one remaining for my 6 mm2 infeed cable. (see the one picture above)

All these fuse blocks have been hanging in place since 2006 and so far I have had only one occasion that I have needed to change a fuse due to one of my led light cables shorting in bike frame. The leds happened to be in the same circuit as the pilot current to my main 80 A relay so the bike was in "stock mode" for the couple of weeks until I had time to look for the problem.


The relays and low amp pilot cables.

Using the relays gave me the advantage of not having to run thick cables all the way to my switches which were starting to add up both in the handlebars as well as on my various dash variations. The pilot current for the relay needs just a very thin cable and those were easy to fit under the handlebar plastic covers etc. I also had to install some relays in the rear part of the bike so I found a nice way to handle the pilot current issue from front to rear...

I happened to have some old PC /  Mac printer cables with 30 to 34 wires each so once when I had the gas tank out I ran at first one and a year later second of these cables from front to rear. This way I did not need to pull the bike full apart each time I added something on the bike.

I started using relays for supplying power to my various add-on things like
- fog lights
- two sets of driving lights (one halogen and one Xenon set)
- extra set of horns
- my seat adjuster
- my Baehr intercoms and bike to bikes radio
- various chargers (cell phones, Ipods, cameras etc)
- rear wiew cameras (all three of them)
etc. etc.

At first I used the standard 12 V car relays which can be obtained at every auto parts store.
I installed the relays under the nose cover and under the seat and trunk.

This is how the front part of the bike looked before I figured this is a dead end. I run out of space and my cable and relay coding did not work...

So I decided to start my cable and relay work all over from scratch. Since I already had quite a bit of farkles installed all I had to do was to draw the schematics, decide the cable coding principle, redo all the cables and relays using the mini relays...Easy piece! A nice winter project...

The list of farkles and the schematics:

This is a partial screenshot of my Excel table which is quite large. The left column is number of the main system. (Like front fog lights, driving lights, power seat adjuster, air compressor etc.) The next column tells the drawing layer name in my CAD-drawing (I started with AutoCad but I currently use Vectorworks). The third column tells the unit code ( F= fuse, R= relay, CN=connector, S= switch). The fourth column tells the cable code. Obviously C=Cable. The rest of the table should be self explanatory.

Since I happen to be a third generation baker and I design large industrial bakery processes by profession I have used the similar principle of system coding in my everyday work so it was familiar to me. I have currently 30 main systems in my bike and the total amount of relays is closer to 50 than 40.

I used about two months of the winter 2006 to make the schematics. I am not a professional electrician let alone an engineer. I studied closely various schematics principles and to me the Harley-Davidson way of showing the connections was most logical. So I decided to use somewhat similar style in my schematics.

I have a total of 6 large sheets of schematics of my electrical connections. My CAD drawing software is optimized for architectual drawings and not for making electrical schematics. I try to learn the way BMW makes the electrical schematics and perhaps later on I will redo these in a different way...

After I had the master plan done the next task was to strip out all the old relays and wires.

Here the (1,5 years) old cables and relays were hanging before stripping them out.

Most of the stripped old relays here.

I found the nice new mini relays which occupied a lot less space than the conventional car relays.

This shows the way the mini relay sockets can easily be joined together.

Here the 8 mini relays are fitted nicely behind the instrument cluster. (The front speakers can be seen on both sides) This picture also shows my first printer cable bundle coming from the rear. Today all those wires are used and a second similar cable has only one or two spare wires left.

These pictures were taken in 2008 and today this set of 8 relays looks a bit more tight since there are now about 15 of them but I guess this shows the principle...

This shows the rear part of the new electricals. Some mini relays can be seen in the rear part in front of the bike alarm. This picture also shows my air hoses. There is one outlet in the rear and one in the front and the compressor is mounted under the plastic cover plate of the rear compartment and therefore not visible in this picture.
The spiral cable contains wires for pillion's iPhone charging and music listening in case she wants to listen to her own stuff and talk her own phone calls through her own Baehr Basic.
The good old Baehr XLintercom sits there on top of the left sidecase. We still use it and are happy with it.  

This pretty much covers the principle of  how I did my electrical connections. If the LT had the CAN bus I'm sure I would use the same principle. The main idea is to keep the extras separate from the bike electricals. However there are some points where a connection is needed. The most important connection points are:
- pilot current for the main 80 A relay, taken from the dash light
- pilot current for the auxiliary driving lights, taken from the bike high beam
- pilot current for the trailer isolation relays (turn signals, tail light and brake light). In case something goes wrong with the trailer wiring the isolation relay protects the bike wiring.
In a CAN bus bike some of the above mentioned connections might need to be done a bit otherwise but basically the biggest problem for me with the new K 1600's would be the lack of space for all the extras as well as the radically smaller alternator (840 W -> 580 W) which would most likely be dropped on it's knees with half of my gadgets 😉

If any questions arise please comment on the blog or email directly ari.ignatius@gmail.com