This past week I installed SW-Motech crash bars on my CB1100. They are satin black and look quite good on the CB, better than the Honda chrome bars, IMO. These bars also afford the ability to mount auxiliary lights to the horizontal bar, and so I purchased a pair of
Clearwater Darla LED lights and installed them. I like my stuff to look as close to OEM as possible, so I routed the wires mostly where the stock wiring goes...
What you'll need:
- Various Hand Tools (ratchet, hex driver, screwdriver, etc.)
- Clearwater Darla (or other aux lights)
- 6amp 12V or better diode (2x)
- High temp wire sheeth
- Soldering apparatus (soldering gun/iron, solder, heat shrink tube)
- Start by removing the two side covers (one bolt each), undoing the fuel pump connector, removing the fuel tank bolt, lifting the fuel tank, unhooking the fuel line and the vent line and removing the tank, removing the gear shift linkage (one bolt), the gear shift side cover (three bolts), and the plastic upper covers (one plastic screw each), as well as the headlight (two main bolts and two screws). All of this is in the service manual. Your bike will now look something like this:
- Next you'll mount the lights to the bars. The SW-Motech bars have a horizontal bar, which is perfect for mounting auxiliary lights. Mounting of the lights themselves is fairly straight forward, so I'll just post some pictures of what it looks like after you've turned some screws.
- Run the wires up the left side past the starter, under the air box, under the frame, past the relays, and into the battery compartment.
- Do a similar thing for the right side. The right side is a little more obvious as there are a couple of wire looms on the bottom of the clutch cover with room to spare that you can run the wiring through.
In this photo, you'll notice that the wire from the light is run where the red arrows show. However, I changed it to run where the blue arrows are so that they're behind the air cleaner box and won't interfere with changing the air filter. Also, since they run behind the box, they are close to the swingarm pivot, so I loosely zip-tied them where the lower blue arrow is to keep them well away from the swingarm.
Here you can see the wiring looms from the lights coming into the battery compartment.
- Next, mount the light adjustment knob on the handlebar just in front of the clutch reservoir. Run the wires along the existing wiring for the left hand switch cluster. You'll need to cut the sheath to run the white trigger wire to the headlight bucket while running the red, black, and green wires back to the battery compartment (this is why we removed the gas tank).
- Encapsulate the red/black/green wires in high-temp sheathing, and run the wires back along the same path as the bike's main wiring harness all the way past the ECU and into the battery compartment.
- Encapsulate the white trigger wire in high-temp/weather-resistant sheathing and run the wiring into the headlight bucket along with the stock wiring. I don't have the heated grips kit, so there is plenty of room for the wires to run into the bucket, as well as inside the bucket. My guess is if you DO have the heated grips kit installed, this might be a little more difficult, however, the wire is 24AWG, and even with the sheath, is still very small.
Here I taped the two sheaths together so they're weather-proof. The taps I'll explain in just a moment.
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[*]This is the most complex portion of the install. These lights only run from 5-55% brightness unless the white trigger wire is supplied with power. When that happens, they go to 100%. I wanted that to happen when
either the high beams are on
or the horn button is pushed. So, we have to tap those wires from the left hand switch cluster. Those wires mate in the headlight bucket, which is why we're running the white wire into there (we could have cut and tapped the wires right on the handlebar but that would have been very ugly). One additional caveat is that if we just tapped both wires and connected them to the white wire, turning on the high beams would blow the horn and vice-versa -- not ideal. We need to wire in a diode to block the reverse flow into the taps that occurs when hitting the horn or high-beams.
[*]This is the headlight bucket. There are two 6p connectors from the left hand switch cluster. One contains the blue wire for the high beam which only has power when either the high beam switch is on, or the flash-to-pass trigger is depressed. The other 6p connector contains the light green wire the has power when the horn button is depressed.
[*]As previously mentioned, besides simply tapping the two wires (I tapped them after the connector, in which case the wire colors actually change; just tap the wire that mates with the specified colors on the connector), we need to wire in a diode on each tap so that power doesn't flow from the tap to the other tap via the common white wire. Be sure to orient the diode correctly.
This is the actual diode wired in series with the tap, before the two taps are joined together. Wiring the diode this way provides strain relief for the delicate diode wires themselves. I used double-wall adhesive heat shrink to cover the diode, and then double-taped the ends to make sure it's waterproof.
Headlight bucket wiring complete, with taps and diodes soldered in.
[*]The only thing left to do now is join all the wires together per the instructions (the reds and blacks from the two lights, the adjuster, and the relay wiring harness, as well as the greens from the two lights and the adjuster), and tap a switched power. Since I ran everything to the battery box, I have access to the rear running light so I tapped that wire. I have some extra stuff back there for my top box and my SupaBrake, so I tapped my own wiring harness, but the stock harness is in the clear rubber cover; the running light is the black/brown wire in the white connector.
[*]Last, tidy everything up and put everything back together. I zip-tied the relay wiring harness because it was a lot of wire. I don't have pictures, but I zip-tied the light wires just behind where the crash bars connect to the frame, as well as loosely tying the left side light wire to the starter wire so that it doesn't touch the starter, as well as the aforementioned loose tie of the right side light wire to the existing wires to keep it away from the swingarm.
If you follow the procedure to empty the fuel line when taking the tank off, the bike will probably be hard to start when you get everything back together. Give it some gas while cranking it, and keep it at quarter throttle until it can run on its own and you'll be good.
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If everything went according to plan, you should now have a bike that looks something like this (very stock, with the added convenience of crash bars and aux lights):
Low beam, minimum power on aux lights.
Low beam, 55% power on aux lights (max permitted via handlebar adjuster).
High beam, full power on aux lights.
The light pictures are kind of deceiving because the camera just kind of drops out the background more and more.
This job took about three or four hours to do. I had to wait for some stuff to come in the mail, and I couldn't do it all at one for various family reasons, but I think that's about how long it took. The hardest part is actually removing the fuel line from underneath the fuel tank. It says not to use tools since you can create a spark and blow yourself up, but I chanced it because there was no way I could hold the locking pawls closed with my hand. I have since purchased a pair of needle-noise pliers from Snap-On that are made of a composite so I can't blow myself up.