The penguin's motorcycling and Jeep blog

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

The never-ending electrical project

Last night I got about 45 minutes to work on the Nightstrom, my flat black 2008 Suzuki DL650 V-Strom. I gave up on relocating the ABS fuses and relay to behind the left side panel. It was too hard to get the left side panel off, requiring too much disassembly of the bike, and replacing those relays and fuses isn't something I want to spend hours doing on the side of a road (eep!). With the relays and fuses still relegated to their original general location behind the battery, I finally gave up on putting the new fuse panel immediately behind the battery. There just was not enough room there. Instead the new fuse panel will have to go in the owner's manual tray.

That decision made, I took some stick-on plastic hooks and moved the ABS fuses and ABS relay to a more compact configuration. They were originally hooked via rubber slots to tabs on a piece of plastic attached to the battery tray. I cut off that plastic extrusion of the battery tray and moved them back to the front side of the owner's manual tray, more to the left. This leaves me room to put the fuse panel relay alongside them in the space to the right of them.

So anyhow, I'm going to stick the fuse panel into the tray with velcro, rather than screws. That way I can more easily lift it when I want to screw new wires into it (otherwise it's damnably hard for my beady little penguin eyes to get a wire into the correct location on the panel). I ran out of velcro so I'm going to need to run to Radio Shack this afternoon and get some. I am taking photographs of everything I am doing, and will post a nice big summary when I'm done. Just remember that what you will see there leaves out all the mis-steps and false starts that thus far have characterized this project, heh :-).

-- Badtux the Electrifying Penguin

1 comment:

Gordon said...

The velcro is a good idea.