Wednesday, April 20, 2016

690 bling blinkers, horn relay, and evap-canister-ectomy

New blinkers for the rear of the 690, and fuel evap-canister removal. 



Expensive, yes at €80 for a pair (~ $100 USD)
They're made by MotoGadget

The silver tube is an integrated circuit, meant to condition the voltage 
being fed from the bike's electrical system. Not sure if it's absolutely 
necessary or not, but I left them in place.


Very tiny, but extremely powerful lights (while the LED itself is quite bright, 
they've managed some pretty amazing optical tricks with the glass lens to 
intensify/concentrate and control the light, making it incredibly bright. 
The stainless fender washer was my way of strengthening the flimsy 
plastic of the mud guard.

Look straight into the light and your eyeballs will explode. 
Holy shit, these are bright!

Horn relay installed to ensure maximum current goes straight to the 
horn and not through the horn switch on the handlebar. The Fiamm 
low tone Highway Blaster I bought at AutoZone ($15) is much louder, 
but it also draws more current.  I measured the resistance across the terminals 
of the stock horn and it was something like ~ 4 ohms.  Resistance measured 
across the Fiamm horn was ~ 1.5 ohms, which means the current draw 
is 2.7 times higher. Holding the horn button on would eventually fry the 
switch due to the increased current draw, so a relay is probably a good idea.

Here's a wiring diagram. I basically did exactly as you see here, except 
I have used just one horn. No photo, but I managed to simply remove the 
whimpy OEM and install the Fiamm horn in the same location, using the
same bracket.




This seemed like a good location for the relay. I used some stretchy 3M 
self-sealing rubberized tape (used for weatherproof outdoor wiring on 
telecom / satellite dish equipment) to protect the terminals from the elements.



I also removed the overflow fuel evaporation canister system 
(a.k.a. partial evap-canister-ectomy)
I followed the instructions at this link since Bartron from ADVRider 
was generous enough to provide full details. Easy to follow.

Variety pack of vacuum line plug/caps.

Left side of throttle body, remove the hose, install rubber cap on the brass vacuum tip.

The hose leading from the bottom of vacuum control valve was 
removed (it went to the left side of the throttle body as shown in the
 previous photo, which was plugged off). Actually, I removed the hose 
and plugged both ends (throttle body and control valve). Eventually, I will 
remove the control valve but for now, it will stay in place until I find a 
22KOhm resistor and install it across the electric terminals that feed it 
(to fool the ECU into thinking it's still connected, preventing error codes). 
Optionally, this dongle from Rottweiler would be a more elegant solution.