NOTE - If you follow this I take no responsibility for any damage caused to yourself or bike. You need to know the basics of electricity - only cut one wire at a time, when cutting/stripping/crimping etc always have the power off etc.
Ok, this is my first DIY so there's gonna be alot of mistakes and edits
It's not going to be as complete as I'd like - I won't be covering panel removal & replacement as I'm trying to do a number of mods all in one go.
So what's it all about..... using that nice flat area above the rear wheel for some extra lightage - in my case I want extra brake lights. I want people to know when I'm slowing down
and I'm gonna use some flexible LED tape - for a number of reasons;
1) I don't want to drill too many intrusive holes - the less holes, the less chance of a leak, however unlikely the possibility.
2) I don't trust myself to be able to drill a number of holes (for individual LEDs) in a perfectly straight line - you don't have to be out by much for it to look wonky.
3) LEDs = low power consumption, very bright, should never need to replace them.
4) the tape format ensures waterproofing and a nice low profile that's easy to work with.
NOTE - you should prepare the surface your sticking to, so use a degreaser/alcohol cleaner then wash with warm water and allow to dry
So here's the tape, I got mine from
www.litewave.co.uk but there should be plenty of places these are available - radioshack, maplins etc
It has a tape on the reverse that you remove to reveal the sticky adhesive.
I wasn't too impressed with the stickiness on my tape however so I dabbed small amounts of black silicone along it to help it stick to the surface.
Next is placement / design.... I opted to go for 2 longer strips on the outside and a slightly shorter strip in the middle.
The moulding on the bike has a bit either side that sticks out so I ran a bit of masking tape along the bottom of these to give me a level starting point and then ran the 2 outside strips vertically along the mouldings
Still using the same pic, I then placed some masking tape on top of those 2 strips to help give a start point for the shorter middle strip.
But at the end of the day, the layout is personal preference
Here's out it looks now.
You way well want to check the operation of the LEDs - you don't want to get to the end to find out they don't work or are flawed. So you'll need a power supply
and then connect all the reds together and then connect all the blacks together. Connect the red to the positive output and the black to the negative output. Set the power supply to 12V and turn on
So now we need a way to get the wires through the plastic.
For a number of reasons - limited space with the tyre in place, on the reverse side there are all the looms and fuseboxes, and availability of tools.... I chose to use a number of drill bits starting from 1mm to 1.5mm and up to 3mm
and then using the smallest drill bit first and working my way up through the sizes spun the drill bits between my fingers while exerting a little bit of pressure. It take about 5 minutes per hole but I wanted to be sure that I didn't poke the drill bit too far through and damage any looms on the other side
Here's the first strip completed. A 3mm hole is just big enough to squeeze the 2 wires through. So not much room for any water to get through, a bit of silicone later on and that will be water tight. Just repeat for the other 2 strips.
Next, we're on to the wiring stage and we need to provide some termination/connections for the wires.
But before I get to that I want to explain the reasons I'm doing it this way.
I wanted it to be easy to connect and disconnect the LED tape. I didn't want a single point of failure (think christmas tree lights) so I wanted the LED to still work if the brake light blew.
For these reasons I'm using these 4mm 'bullet' crimp connectors and a parallel circuit layout. (image isn't great sorry)
The wires that come with the tape aren't very long which will make the next bit a little bit more difficult, but it's still relatively easy to do with the length of cable available and I wanted to have as small a hole as possible to poke the wires through. You could put crimps on first and then poke the wires through the hole, but then would need to make bigger holes.
So to crimp you'll need one of these, ratchet crimpers are the best and notice that the jaws are colour coded - red spot for red crimps
, and the inside of the jaw is shaped so put the crimp in the right way
But before we crimp we may need to trim / cut /strip wires so you'll need a set of wire cutters
If you've never stripped the insulation from the wire you'll probably want an adjustable cable stripper too - mine doesn't get used much
So onto crimping (again sorry about picture quality), I've always been taught to twist the bare stranded wire
then fold in half
and then terminate the wire in the crimp so that's how I did it
Note - that I'm crimping the the LED tape wires. This is not the power supply side, when these are disconnected there's no potential for these to be live so I'm using the male/exposed/bullet crimps.
Repeat 5 more times so there are 6 male crimps ready to go
