I’ve always shied away from wiring...(pet hate) so when doing stuff on cars and bikes was cautious... well this job entailed that I get in and replace the whole loom... tuff on the brain.
So I first got hold of a blackbox from Germany which makes it easy to wire all the handlebar buttons and main stuff like lights, starter, indicators, horn... etc, it eliminates all the relays into a small box.
With that wiring diagram and the factory wiring I was really confused so I scanned the workshop manual into a .jpeg and opened in paint, then I whited out all the stuff I didn’t need that the blackbox was going to do, so that left stuff like ignition stuff, oil & nutural idiot lights, brake light switches.. Etc.
Then I drew in the black box and put in its coloured wires and e-mailed the Germans with a couple of finishing questions and all is good... then blew it up to massive poster size (A1) in colour...
I think having done and spent time doing this helped me kind of know the logic in how a few things work...
So the wiring began, to make things a little easier I used 7 core trailer wires and only had to run two lengths from the battery box to the front and it worked a treat...
I used an original Deutsch connector up the front and a mixture of brass bullet and blade connectors in the box.
I have run an Odyssey PC310 battery because it’s very small... now I couldn’t find anything on running this on Harleys except unresolved threads on different forums and no definitive answers... only one guy said he used it and it went good, and that was on a drag bike and he ran it between the primary belt drive to save space.. I did note some things relevant to me, it’s just running his ignition and no lights indicators and his bike is running for a couple of minutes at a time...
Well, to date, my bike isn’t on the road, but! the battery starts and runs the thing, it runs the lights and the charging system seems to be putting in more than is going out?!
I took off the handlebar switch blocks and put in some micro buttons and have found that there are different quality ones about, good idea but spend more for good ones. I have found two that are so sensitive and one stayed on when you turn on ignition so have to replace that. It caused weird things to happen; pulling off the offending corresponding wire fixed everything so it wasn’t too hard to work out. Ours are not the best of suppliers here and I see the buttons sold in various outlets in the USA, I did see one ages ago and I wish I had saved it, they had coloured wires available on the button switches ( 4 wire colour options) instead of just black and looked to be good quality, I did some surfing.. But when your specifically looking you won’t find! Aye.
Well, here it is, tight as a preverbal, but working none the less, I was quite worried for some time I’d got the box a bit small...
The only thing I deviated from with the diagram was to eliminate the starter button, I am running the one direct off the starter and eliminating the kill switch, just using the ignition key, when I did this I forgot to put power to the coil, but no spark caused me to look harder at the, why? So there are tricks... to be learnt...
I also did not re-install the VOES, so am still working on whether to earth it or not, can’t find a definitive answer...
Now all this has been an exercise and after some riding and some time I will pull the bike down to powder coat the frame, repaint the tins and will re-wire with vintage-style braided cotton cloth covered wire, like some you can see in one of the photos.
