Motorcycle Wiring, Part 2

Now, one reason why folks think that electrical wiring is brain surgery is because you need a buncha shit to do it. Tools and connectors and supplies, that is. None of what you need to do electrical wiring is all that hard to figure out, but there's just a lot of it. So let's start with some of the stuff that's going to be needed to add the fuse box to my Weestrom. Okay, here's the key:

• A - bullet-type crimp-on connectors. Jap bikes love these things. I have more of a 'meh' connection to them. I have two sizes (large/small), male and female here, I get'em from Halted Supply Company here in Sunnyvale. These are used to hook two wires together, generally one from your gizmo and one to the "+" or "-" on your fuse block. Make sure that the female side (the side with the hole, not the side with the penis that sticks into your hole) is on the *battery* half of the wire for the "+" side, and on the *gizmo* half of the wire for the "-" side. That keeps your elves from escaping out the leaky penis on the end of the wire to your frame (a "short circuit") when you unplug the wire, heh!
• B - Heat-shrink tubing. You slide this over a connection (*before* you crimp on the connector, heh!), then blow hot air on it with the heat gun. It then shrinks to make an airtight/watertight connection. You can also slide the bigger size over a bunch of wires and blow on'em to get'em all nice and tight together and protected from sharp stuff like brackets and such.
• C - self-sticking electrical tape, sticky electrical tape. This keeps your elves from escaping from the wire (heh!). The self-sticking stuff is neater because you just stretch it over itself and it sticks to itself, but it doesn't leave sticky glue all over. Sometimes you just can't get down there to do it, so the sticky stuff is needed. Mostly you use electrical tape when you have to solder two wires together (no, not slobber, solder, I'll talk about that later). I don't do that soldering shit a whole lot nowdays, soldered connections on a bike tend to break because they're not flexible and the vibration gets'em.
• D - dielectric silicone grease. This keeps your push-on connectors from arcing or corroding. Just poke a little into the hole to, err, lube, the female part (hmm, where have I done that kinda shit before?), then wipe a thin layer on the male part so it slides in nice and fine, and it'll keep your connector passing electrons just fine and dandy from one half to the other.
• E - Crimping and wire stripping tool, yet *more* crimp-on connectors. The crimping tool lets you strip the plastic insulation off the end of a wire (the plastic insulation is what keeps your electrons from jumpin' ship, so obviously you gotta have it gone off the end of your wire if you want the electrons to pass thru the connection!) and then you use the tool to crimp the connector onto the bare end of the wire. I won't need this other set of crimp-on connectors for my current project, but this assortment from Radio Shack is a nice assortment to have around. Pretty much any kinda connector you need for any project, you'll find one there. But like I said, Jap bikes love them bullet connectors, so those blue and red bullets over on the left are what I use most.
• F - the heat gun for the heat-shrink tubing! You can use a hair dryer instead of this thing, but my hair dryer is upstairs, not in my garage, and the heat gun concentrates the heat better, so I finally bought one. Use it on *low*, hi will strip paint off your bike!
• G - The Volt-ohm meter. This is a cute little one from Radio Shack that lives in my toolbox because it has a nice little lid to keep it safe. Basically, when set to "Volt", it lets you know whether you have some nice little elves ready to do work. Put one lead on the "-" of the battery, put the other where you're supposed to have some "+" juice, and it should read somewhere between 12 and 13 volts. If not, you got somethin' wrong, a broken wire or something where your li'l elven electrons can't get from the "+" pole of the battery to where you're expecting them! When set to Ohms, you hook one lead to one end of a wire and the other lead to the other end of the wire. You ought to get a reading of 0 (zero) ohms or somewhere close to that. Anything higher, you either have a corroded connection somewhere, or a broken wire. More on actual use of this little gadget later.

Now let's look on the right side of my workbench:

• H - some rubber grommets. I will be passing wires through a hole drilled in a tray to get them to the new fuse box. These grommets will protect the wires from being cut by the sharp plastic of the tray.
• I - Some zip-ties. For zip-tying wires together or to frame tubes or shit to keep them neat and clean (and keep them from flopping around and rubbing against shit and rubbing through and shorting out or breaking).
• J - Wire cutters. For cutting wires to the correct length. Duh. Also good for cutting the excess length of zip-ties off.
• K - A 50 watt soldering iron. M - the solder. The fuse block that I bought has screw-down terminals. To do motorcycle wiring, you use multi-stranded wire, wire that's made of lots of little wires woven together, because solid wire vibrates and flexes and breaks. Multi-stranded wire squishes down in screw-down terminals and tends to pull out easily. So I am going to "tin" the ends of my wires -- I am going to heat up the end of the wire with the soldering iron until it is hot enough to melt solder applied to the top of the wire. This will leave the strands held together by the melted tin-lead mix (the solder) so that they don't squish down and pull out as easily when I screw the terminals down on them. Also protects the wires from corrosion somewhat (but I'll still use the dielectric grease here, yessiree!).
• L - wire. Wire comes in a lot of sizes, called "gauges". The smaller the wire, the bigger the gauge number. A tiny thread-like wire used inside computers, so tiny it's hard to see, would be 28 gauge wire -- a big number. The big wire coming into your house from the electric meter, the one that's bigger around than your thumb, is so big that it's 00 gauge -- one zero wasn't enough, they had to add another 0 to it to let ya know it was *really* big! Most of what we do in motorcycle wiring is with 16 gauge wire, which will carry 15 amps of current pretty much anywhere on a motorcycle. What you're looking at is three spools of 16 gauge wire and one spool of 14 gauge wire, which is slightly bigger and might be used to carry juice to your headlights or from the battery to your fuse panel. The bigger the wire, the more of your little elven electrons it can carry without heating up and causing energy to get used to heat up your wire rather than to operate your gizmo. But most of the time, 14 gauge on a motorcycle is a waste. More on wire later on.
• N - Some jumpers to use when testing things with the volt meter. On bikes that have the battery grounded to the frame, you can just touch one lead to the frame and one lead to what you want to test. But with the V-Strom, which has an aluminum frame that is not grounded (i.e. all wires have to go back to the distribution block for their ground), you have to get the "-" lead of your voltmeter back to the "-" on the battery, or else ain't nothin' happenin'. Thus this set of small alligator-clip jumper wires.

Not shown: The drill I'll use to drill a hole in the underseat tray, the screws I'll use to screw the fuse panel into the underseat tray, and the bag full of nuts and bolts that I'll search through to find the ones just the right size to hold the fuse panel to the underseat tray. (Yeah yeah, I know I ought to have those all sorted out according to size and shit, but so it goes).

Now, this all seems sorta overload. But all of these tools and supplies are pretty simple to use, and we're going to use most of them for the next part of the project. I'll show you what's what in actual action when we do that. So next, we get to install the fuse panel and then extend the wiring currently going up to the GPS to go to the fuse panel instead of directly to the battery. We are now entering into the meat of this project... but one where I take a big, BIG short-cut rather than do it all from scratch like I did the previous three times I did this project. You'll just have to wait and see to see what kind of short-cut I take, eh?

-- Badtux the Electrifying Penguin

Oops, I did it again!

Everybody who wrenches at some time or another strips out a hole or breaks off a bolt in a hole. What to do next depends on what kinda hole it was and whether you can easily replace the part that is stripped out or has a bolt jammed in it. If it's a $1,000 cylinder head, for example, you ain't gonna replace it -- you're gonna fix it. But how?!

Okay, first a digression: buy a set of torque wrenches, and use them. Don't gimme that crap about how you have been wrenchin' fer forty years and you know the right torque by "feel". It's bullshit. I can "feel" the right torque if I just used a torque wrench on a bolt and torqued it to the exact same torque from the same moment arm, otherwise I'm like every other wrench on this planet -- I overtorque small bolts, and undertorque big'uns. My use of torque wrenches tends to bear that out -- my torque wrench always clicks long before I think the bolt is "tight enough" on small bolts, and on large bolts I'm always sayin', "is this damned torque wrench gonna ever friggin' click? Is it broken or somethin'?" Of course it ain't. I just haven't torqued the big bolt enough yet.

My recommendations for torque wrenches: Sears "click" types. First of all, you can get'em calibrated by Sears Roebuck & Company, though if you properly care for them by putting them away in their cases with the dial set to zero between uses, they generally don't need calibrating more than every five years or so. These make a little "click" noise when you reach the set torque. You may not be able to see a dial or lever when your ass is buried deep under a car hood, but you can damn well hear the "click". Furthermore, get a set. I got a little inch pounds one, a medium-sized one that goes to about 50 foot-pounds, then a big'un that goes all the way to 150 ft/lbs. Deal is that big torque wrenches are no good at the low end of their scale, they're just not very accurate down there, so you need small torque wrenches to handle those. But when you're torquing lug nuts to 100 ft/lbs (gotta do it evenly so that you don't warp the brake rotor)1, you damn well need that big friggin' wrench. And yeah, they're expensive. So what. Don't buy cheap tools, that's how ya get busted knuckles. (Sorry, Ornery Bastard, had to steal yer tag line there).

Anyhow, back to the thread repair. What kind of thread repair you use depends on what you're fixing. Me, I'm going to take that cross-member that I broke a bolt off in the other day, drill that bolt out of there, and then put a thread repair coil in there. If it was a spark plug hole or a brake cylinder bleeder hole I'd use something different -- a Timesert, which is a solid repair that won't leak like a Heli-coil or its clones. But for a general frame tube that's expensive overkill. Anyhow, here's a Heli-coil kit, a Makita drill, a bench vise, and a left-handed drill bit for drilling out a bolt broke off in a hole: Now, one thing you'll find out, pricing thread repair kits, is that they're expensive. The good part is that you can re-use them and just buy coils. That particular Heli-coil kit is so old that the packaging has yellowed, but the tap and insert in it work just fine. As for the Makita drill, a word of advice -- have a second fully-charged battery available if you're using a battery-powered drill. This is my only drill that will hold a 31/64 drill bit (needed for the Heli-coil kit), so that's what I gotta use. Finally, it's a lot easier to work on a piece if you can get it up on your bench. Obviously that won't work if you're working on the frame of a car, but here I took a bit of inner tube and stuck that frame tube on my bench and started drilling, first punching a small indention with a punch then drilling like my life depended on it: Until finally, I drilled all the way through: Once through, I moved up one drill bit size at a time until I was up to the size specified on the Heli-coil packaging, then tapped new threads into it to wind the Heli-coil into. Note: I used the can of cutting oil in the pump can below the bench to lubricate the tap, those things are expensive ($55 for a Helicoil kit nowdays, and most of that is for the tap!). Said cutting oil actually being 80w gear oil :-). Note that I'm using a high-tech tap wrench on this tap, but you'll see a "real" tap wrench later: Once the hole is threaded, then you put the coil on its inserter so that the tang is resting against its end: And then screw it into the hole using the inserter and a tap wrench (from my tap and die set, duh). Until finally it's all the way in! And then you have to break off the tang on the bottom using a punch and a hammer. Luckily I have a punch set from Cheap Chinese Tool Company in the second drawer from the top of my rightmost tool chest-of-drawers (which used to be a bedroom chest-of-drawers before I retired its ugly ass to the garage). One whack with the hammer, and the tang was history. And now the end result: Yay, my (replacement) bolt screws in! And now I'm ready to put this cross-member back on the bike until its replacement gets here. Beats bein' out of commission for a week!

-- Badtux the Wrenchin' Penguin

Motorcycle wheel bearing tool

Hmm, this looks like a slick little setup. Lessee, do I want to risk bumming my wheel with a drift, or no?

No point, just sorta insta-bookmarking another tool for this tool geek to buy next time he wants to extract motorcycle wheel bearings.

-- Badtux the Tool Geek Penguin