How to Wire Your Motorcycle - Revival Cycles' Tech Talk

welcome to revival cycles Tech Talk I'm Stefan and in this episode we're going to solve one of life's great mysteries how to plan out and lay out all the wiring on your motorcycle alright so you're looking at rewiring your entire motorcycle and if you're like most people that should be really intimidating and quite a daunting process when you first start out is a lot that goes into it you probably look at the OEM wire diagram and within about five minutes you probably have a headache and just most people really this is the last thing they want to deal with but if you break it down into smaller pieces bite-sized chunks and just focus on one thing at a time it's really not that bad we're going to show you exactly how to do that and this is the process that we actually use here at revival cycles in order to build these bikes and it all starts out with a checklist the checklist ensures that we have all the answers to which components are going to be on the bike which features and functions the bikes going to have and that really dictates how the rest of the electrical system goes together now on that checklist the first thing is the EM unit and we've done a lot of videos on these you've probably seen them if you're watching this you probably know exactly what it is reference the other videos for the details on this magic device but this is the heart and soul this is the brains of the operation first thing you need to make sure you've got on on your list next going to need a battery this is an antigravity four cell which is what we usually use for demonstrations because it's nice light small and it does the job but in most builds if you've got an electric starter you're going to need at least an eight cell battery if you've got a larger displacement bike basically anything over I don't know about 800 to 1,000 CCS you should probably step up to a 12 cell and if you've got some absolute monster high compression enormous displacement then push up to a 16 cell also going to need a starter solenoid we've done a nice little video on this unit which is the recommended starter solenoid because it's got a built in main fuse and it's just very simple and concise package makes installation very simple so starter solenoid good thing to have you're also going to need some handlebar switches in this case I would recommend the em switch minis these are really convenient because they come pre-wired with a multi conductor wire we've done a video on these as well these are great and this is what I prefer to use on all of our builds you're also going to need some kind of an instrument or dash panel some warning lights a speedometer maybe a tachometer and you can use the OEM stuff but you might also want to use this moto scope mini for moto gadget because it's really compact and it's just a simple little solution we'll show you basically the general gist we're going to leave the instrument as kind of just a black box of these are the inputs that need to go to it and then the details of what's happening on the instrument panel are going to be up to your specific bike there's a few more things that we're going to need and just so I don't forget I'm actually going to reference our checklist so we've talked about the EM unit battery ignition system will demonstrate based off an OEM ignition system in this case and that is basically the reason we do that is because any aftermarket system will tell you how to adjust or how to convert from the OEM system to the aftermarket system so we'll start om you can make the conversion based on your specific system charging system again those usually stay fairly close to the OEM format the one thing that is a difference or discrepancy is we recommend upgrading the regulator rectifiers to modern solid-state units if you've got one of the old separate regulator and separate rectifiers the combination reg rec is just a simpler way to go easier to wire and just generally more reliable we talked about a starter solenoid we're also going to need a horn you're going to need an ignition switch something to turn the whole thing on and off just because it's the more interesting version we'll use an EM lock in this demonstration we talked about handlebar switches gauge and dash light brake light switches typically those are going to be part of the perch or part of the levers if you don't have them on your levers and you're using hydraulic brakes just use the hydraulic brake switches for the banjo bolts also need engine sensors neutral oil pressure vehicle speed sensor and a few others that you may have added in order to communicate all the lights on the dash so make sure you've got all your sensors laid out maybe you need low fuel light sensors and things like that you'll need to get that included on your wire diagram and then you get down to like just the really basic stuff that every bike has headlight taillight turn signals and in some cases you'll also need a license plate light depending on your local regulations that's the checklist for all the components and once you've got an answer for what those are going to be and which parts and pieces you're going to need that will determine what outputs what inputs and all the details of what goes on your wire diagram when you actually go to wire the bike there's a few more things on the checklist you're going to need battery cables we've got a kit for that you're going to need wire in various sizes we've also got a kit for that and then there's a few tools that are really handy to have open barrel you crimpers ferrule crimpers to make the connections to the EM unit some heat-shrink is really handy just for making all the splices that need to happen and then of course once you're all done with the wiring then you need to make a loom electrical tape is definitely the easiest and quite common if you do want you can use the braided looms or the tubular looms but be warned that makes the whole process much more difficult and you really are playing this chess game that needs to be three or four moves out so that you don't end up with a termination where you can't get loom on it start if this is your first one start with just planning electrical tape after you get used to it then you can step up to doing a tubular loom that's way more difficult alright so now we've got our checklist determined we can actually start laying out what we're going to do and how we're going to do it so we've got a little bit bigger whiteboard this time and we're going to need that because this will get kind of complicated I'll do my best to keep it clean and concise but again doing this on the fly I'm liable to make mistakes so please bear with me first thing m unit so we'll start with making an M unit right in the middle and of course these proportions aren't accurate but it's more so that we can tell what this thing is now we've got all the outputs and we start with a right turn then we've got the starter horn left turn then we've got the low beam high beam the brake light and the auxilary then down here we've got the main power in put the two mounting bosses our ground and just so we don't forget I'm going to brown that right now then same thing on inputs it's right turn starter horn left turn then its config then it's headlight then break and then lock input alright so there's the M unit next up will be next up will be the battery I'm going to put that over here in this corner I got a positive and a negative next ignition system so we'll start with just drawing a couple of coils the wire diagram that I'm drawing right now is actually based off of a honda CB 350 partly because it's a very common bike that we get a lot of questions about and it's also a good example because it is kind of just a very basic wiring diagram for virtually any motorcycle almost all the Japanese bikes will have the same kind of wiring scheme I'm just going to move those are a little too high so let's start those guys over ignition system coils all right and those have sparkplug wires that go out to spark plugs that don't look anything like this but I think you know what I mean another spark plug all right we also have a contact breaker plate and that's where your points are but don't worry about wiring that stuff up yet just call that an ignition system also going to need a charging system and for that I'm going to start with the stator and in the case of the honda CB 350 it looks kind of like this at least according to the manual and these are the the actual stator windings the different coils and the CB 350 is a little bit weird because it's got this old archaic format where they will basically connect one coil when you're using the lights and disconnect it when you're not using the lights but with modern regulator rectifiers there's no need to do this anymore and so we'll actually just join these wires are the yellow white and then the pink is over here and what we'll do is just join the white wire to the pink there sorry white wire to the yellow and that simulates what happens in the switch when you turn the headlights on okay so we've got our stator the other part of a charging system is just the regulator rectifier and we're going to assume a combination reg rec that'll take care of our charging system after that we need a starter solenoid it's going to put that right here and like I said our starter solenoid comes with a main fuse in it and that's going to happen in this little control box and then here's schematically this is the actual solenoid down here for the high current to the starter which need a starter right here that's got a little thing that sticks out there and the part to connect the electric of course the starter is grounded through the chassis of the bike so add that in real quick after that we need a horn easy enough just throw horn up here and it makes noise ignition switch like I said we'll use an EM lock in this demonstration all right handlebar switches we're going to put those over here because we're demonstrating this with the em switch minis these have three different buttons three different circuits built into them and those are just momentary contacts they look kind of something like this so this can be the left and this one can be the right all right handlebar switches done so next up we've got the dash and instrument panel and like I said we're just going to represent this with a single kind of schematic gauge it's got you know round face and a needle that points somewhere near redline for the electrical connections it's just going to be kind of everything is going to connect to this one line and that just realize that this whole thing that's your dash entirely if you're using the OEM dash reference your OEM diagram to figure out how they should connect within there if you're using an aftermarket use their instructions if you're using motor gadget use their instructions but everything that feeds into the - the the inputs for the dash are all just going to connect to that one node all right after the - we need some brake light switches so of course these are going to be mounted at the levers or on the hydraulic lines but I'm just going to schematically represent them down here because it's convenient for my drawing so these are also going to be ground reference switches so just add a ground this will be the rear and this will be the front next we've got engine sensors so we've got a neutral an oil pressure and a vehicle speed sensor now these again are all just simple switches that reference to ground and both the neutral light and oil pressure light will ground through the engine whereas the vehicle speed sensor is the magnetic read switch that comes with a moto gadget gauge and that you can ground either through the wire or to the chassis whatever is convenient just make sure it's a good solid contact ground after engine sensors let's put in a headlight so just a simple headlight with a shell and of course we need a taillight so simple taillight then we also need some turn signals so we've got a right left and a right and left last thing that license plate light I'll just throw that in over here as an example of what else you might need so turn signals and brake lights all make light and those weird squiggly lines that's that's what light looks like in the electrical world okay that is all the components that we need to have in our system and the only thing that remains at this point is to connect them all up remember with a starter solenoid we do have a main fuse so that comes off of this lug and then there's the fuse up here and then it's got two outputs from that fuse just so we don't forget call we'll call this the fuse all right so when I'm wiring a bike the first thing I want to do is connect the the big heavy cables for the battery they're the most difficult to route because of the largest the stiffest and it's also just a good spot to start because it's really simple you can get your head around it that gets your feet wet just get your mind in the game so big heavy cable goes from the starter solenoid right to the battery post and then from the solenoid right to the starter now this gives us a connection through the main fuse to these two terminals and that's what we'll use to actually power the auxilary now I'm going to switch to a little bit smaller wire and make that connection now keep in mind that main fuse is there so we've already got the main fuse in the system no problem that means we can also connect directly to from that other terminal directly to the regulator rectifier and we also can connect constant power to the M lock right down here but remember the M lock needs to have a one amp fuse to protect those small wires that are in there so this is just a little fuse yeah writing on a whiteboard is not my specialty but I hope you know what that means the other thing that needs constant power potentially is your gauge if it's got a time of day clock or something like that you're going to need to have power run up there and in a case of moto gadget gauges that power also needs to be fused at one amp so you can piggyback right off the one that's powering the M lock and we can just bring that up and feed it into our instrument cluster that's pretty much everything that needs to have constant power in the system or a continuous connection to the battery so next up I'd like to do the inputs just because it's pretty straightforward the first thing that we'll do is connect the right-hand turn signal the assignment of buttons on your handlebar controls aren't important but in our case let's just do that one's going to be the right-hand turn signal next we'll do the starter starter comes in after that we've got the horn and with the horn I know I'm going to run out of color so the horn is going to get a red with black - add that - in alright now we've got the left-hand turn signal and that one will be purple and I made these kind of clothes but I think I can sneak everything through now the next one up is the config and there's no need to have a continuous configuration connection connection because most the time you'll configure the EM unit once and then that's it if you are using an M button of course the M button connects to config and then all this stuff shifts back to the bars but you still have pretty much all the same connections alright the the next one's headlight so that one will be blue snake that through goes to headlight lastly we've got the break how about break can be pink and that's just going to connect right down to our front and also rear brake light switches ok last input is the lock input and that is just going to go directly down to the M lock and the last thing the M lock needs is a ground so we can throw that in sometimes you actually want to carry the grounds all to a common splice connection so that you don't have to wonder if you've got a good connection to your chassis ground and I'll show that on a few of the other components here but because it gets too complicated a lot of the things down here I'm just going to leave them with the typical ground signal but realize you could actually run wires to each of these components and ensure that you've got excellent ground connections and of course all of our handlebar switches need to have that ground and I'm going to bring that up all the way to here and this is an example I was just explaining where all of the grounds splice together and go to a common termination to make sure that you've got excellent ground connections good inputs are done at this point if you were actually wiring the bike and you'd actually done all of these things you could turn the m unit on and actually verify that all of your inputs work because when you connect these the LEDs on the M unit will light up as will the outputs and you can make sure that you don't have any mistakes at this point the next thing that I would do if I were wiring a bike and in this case planning the wiring of a bike I would actually work on the ignition and the charging systems so the charging system is almost complete because the regulator rectifier just needs the connection to the stator and also a connection to ground so we add our ground right here and then typically your stator wires or at least the wires on your regulator rectifier are going to be yellow I don't have a yellow pen because you wouldn't be able to see it and in that case we're going to use Orange so from those two let's go into the regulator rectifier okay if you were able to actually start and run this bike in this condition it would actually charge the battery this whole setup is actually working as a complete charging system at least in terms of the CB 350 because they're very simple and there's nothing else that goes to it some of you guys with the BMW are bikes or the motor good C's that have field excited ignition or excuse me feel exciting charging systems it'll get a little more complicated but we'll review that at the end of this discussion next up ignition system now the ignition system gets powered from the auxiliary output and on our bikes I like to use Brown as the switched power wire and that one just kind of comes up and splits and powers both the coils this is part of what makes breaker points ignitions really simple and reliable is that there's just not not that much to them the only other thing we need to get the ignition system to work is a connection from each coil to the breaker points and for lack of a better color I'll just say that this one is all right and of course the breaker points are grounded through the engine now that's enough to get a OAM breaker points type ignition to actually work on the bike if you were installing an aftermarket ignition system consider from this reference as the OEM reference whatever modifications they ask for in their system just apply those to this portion of the diagram realizing you get power for the entire ignition system from the auxiliary output okay the next output that we can work on is the brake and for a brake we're using pink and the brake is very very easy it just needs to go off and go to our taillight if your taillights like most taillights you're going to have three wires you're going to have a ground the pink brake light and then you're also going to have a taillight which I'm going to draw as purple but because we're using an EM unit you can just tie those together so take your purple taillight wire and tie it in with your pink brake light wire and then configure the EM unit for one wire taillight and taillights done so next after that high-beam that one I always like to use blue and we can take off from there go across to the headlight we're also going to need to connect our high beam to the instrument lights so that you know you've got your high beam indicator on your dash so that ties in they're also going to need a low beam don't really have a great color for low beam but let's just use green and we'll throw some dashes on it so that's going to go along to the headlight and some black dashes just to differentiate it from the starter wire when we get to it okay so now we've got everything up to the turn signals worked out and our turn signal is purple and that's for the left-hand turn signal so that just runs out to the left-hand turn signal again it also needs to connect to our instruments that you know when your turn signals are operating so we're going to splice off of that and go up to our instrument the horn is red with black Fleck so the horn just goes out and up to the horn and then add our little black dots so we know that it's not a constant power wire which are all red then the starter pretty simple that one's green and it's just going to go down to the starter solenoid the starter solenoid also needs to have a ground connection and we can just bring that out and ground it now these two terminals what they're really doing they're going inside they go to the control coil and that's what actually activates the solenoid in order to turn the starter on last one is the right-hand turn signal and that one as you would expect just goes straight out to the right-hand turn signal of course we also need to have that connection to the to the instrument panel so those go up crews across and go to the instrument panel all right getting close we've got a charging system ignition system we need some grounds on our lighting we also didn't even connect our forward turn signals so we can just splice off of this guy right here come down feed that one and and purple for the other splice off right here come down and feed the left need some grounds to finish off our lighting circuits so bring that all together and you know what we can just tie that into this ground right here that's fine same thing over here we've got few that just need to tie in so that they're grounded as well ground our license plate light and now that it's grounded let's connect it the license plate light should be on anytime you're riding the bike so we'll just connect that to the auxiliary power and right there now we've got a license plate light what isn't connected all right all of our engine sensors are still not connected but that's pretty much it and in the case of these engine sensors they just go directly to the gauge so we can bring this VSS which is vehicle speed sensor straight up and into the gauge then the oil the oil pressure sensor can that one can be pink because we don't have that going into the gauge yet that goes into the gauge and the last one the neutral light also goes up and into the gauge so we just worked out an entire wiring diagram for a basic Honda CB virtually any CB but also virtually any Japanese bike there's one last thing that if anyone's really paying close attention you'd notice we don't have a ground on our battery naturally you need that this needs to go to the chassis to the engine and to the EM unit and that will also tie in to all of this forward lighting and it's back lighting etc so this is pretty appropriate to most the Japanese and maybe Italian bikes from before 1980 or so this is pretty close to what you'd be looking at however if you've got a field excited charging system there's a bit of a change that needs to happen over here with our stator and regulator rectifier first of all feel excited charting systems are three-phase so we don't have this type of arrangement we just have three yellow wires that go to the regulator rectifier and those represent the three phases but then we also have two other connections that come out to power what is known as the field coil and those wires might be different colors depending on exactly which type of bike you've got and what the field coil does is it creates a magnetic field that the it creates a magnetic field that actually rotates inside the stator and that is what induces the current in the stator windings of creating the power the regulator rectifier then rectifies it into DC sends it back to the battery through the solenoid the last thing that we need in order to get a field excited system to work is we do need a connection to the auxilary because it needs a reference or excitation voltage to begin creating that power because it got it needs to have something in order to power the field coil before the stator can actually generate power so that would be what's there all the wire colors on this are going to be a little different depending on specifically which rectifier you're using or specifically which bike this is on also if you are working on a Harley or a BMW or a moto Guzzi your starter system is slightly different than this and you will still have a starter solenoid except it is integrated directly into the starter itself and what that means is I'm going to erase this section and show you how it would be connected if you had a BMW Harley or moto Guzzi so we get rid of the solenoid there and recall that it's actually integral to the starter itself so the starter now just connects directly to the battery and then there is a starter control wire that comes down and plugs into the starter somewhere sometimes it's a little tab on the back but it's a small quarter inch Spade connection and that controls the integrated solenoid in the starter and now your starter actually works notice we've got some dangling wires here that's not going to do we need to add in a main fuse again so these guys can be connected and then add our main fuse and then tie that back in to our battery so now this works for any of the harley BMW moto Guzzi also has the field excited charging system and again use your auxiliary output to power the ignition system but the details of your ignition system are going to depend on your specific bike and which specific ignition system you plan to use really shouldn't be too hard to deduce or work through how to upgrade from this om coils and breaker plate to a solid-state ignition well I hope that wasn't too confusing I realize that this is a lot of information it probably is still daunting electrical takes some time to get used to we've got a few other videos that we've done that explain kind of the fundamental theories of electricity as applied to motorcycles and here you can see how all of this the different components all the different systems work with each other and how they connect to each other and if you work through this step-by-step system by system one at a time focus on one circuit at a time this can be your map your road map to get through your whole project this is a great place to start it doesn't cost you any money to work out this part and you can figure out and get your head wrapped around the entire electrical project before you even spend a dollar at revival cycles we always use the parts that we sell then that means that we know exactly how they work we know exactly how they don't work and that means if you run into trouble on your build you can always send an email to TechSoup whatever revival cycles calm speaking of making mistakes and running into trouble I realized there's one thing on this diagram that I forgot and that is we need to have a switched power connection to our instrument cluster so you can turn on things like your your indicator lights just the dash lights to light up at night so you can see your gauges at night or just to turn the gauge on completely so for that we're just going to tie off of the auxilary and sneak up here this one also needs to have a fuse and then it can find a spot into the instrument harness remember to mark that as fuse all right like I said knew I was going to make a mistake somewhere along the line today and nobody's perfect the trick is when you do make a mistake you go back and fix it so on that I really do thank you for watching and if you are interested in these parts check out revival cycles com if you run into trouble tech support at revival cycles calm now at the start of this you probably thought this was going to be a really difficult and intimidating process I really do hope that going over at this level has answered a lot of your questions and taken some of the fear out of tackling a project of this scale trust me it's not that bad just break it down one system at a time and focus on one circuit in that system at a time and you can get through this thanks for watching guys get your bikes back on the road you

Channel: Revival Cycles

Views: 460,217

Rating: 4.8558059 out of 5

Keywords: revival cycles, motonerd, motorcycle electrical, motorcycle wiring, diy, how to, motogadget, m-unit, revival cycles tech talk, tech talk, electrical how to, wiring, wiaring diagram, how to wire, how to wire a motorycle, how to wire a motorcycle starter, m-unit blue, munit, m unit, motorcycling wiring diagram, wiring motorcycle, motorcycle electrical system, motogadget m-unit

Id: -m5aUoAK_DM

Length: 33min 43sec (2023 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 20 2016