New Trunk, now with more electrons!

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Ok I wasn't sure whether to post this in luggage, projects, or here but here won.  So one of the first things I do to any of my bikes is install a trunk, specifically a bestem 929.  There are many reasons, but in general order of importance it's so my daughter has a backrest and so I can carry crap.  I standardized on the bestem because it's cheap but not horrible.  So where are the electrons?  I'm glad you asked.

The 929 has a small 4 led unit that you can use for whatever, and comes with a pair of wires with bullet connectors.  Nice start but not to my standards.  In my trunks I add running lights, turn signals, and a couple other goodies.
First thing's first, I hate hacking into the stock harness.  They are marginal at best stock, and normally the first thing I do when I get a bike is unfvck whatever the prior owners have done.  This bike is gloriously stock, so I was able to do it the way I want.  First thing I did was find connection points for the turn signals.  The wires run alongside the frame, green on the right and brown on the left, and conveniently have bullet connectors under the seat.  So I made jumper wires using bullet connectors and similarly colored wire for both sides.  

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Then I neatly tucked the new wire bundles away next to the stock wires, using the stock tabs.

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Then I pulled the taillight connector, cut it off, and added bullet connectors.  Then I made jumpers like I made for the turn signals, again using the same color wire.  Adding the bullets let me pull all of my harness out and reconnect the stock connector.  Plan for the future.

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Then I added another ground, and pulled a switched +12v from my relay I installed earlier, and ran two bundles of wires through some sleeve and terminated everything in an 8-pin deutsch connector.  This is a standard for my bikes, mostly because I picked up a couple on ebay for cheap a few years ago.  The nice thing is that now my kids or I can grab any trunk for any bike and everything works.  My eight pins (not all eight used on every bike) are two grounds, +12v switched, +12v constant, right turn signal, left turn signal, brake, and running light. The pinout makes no sense at all, it's just where I mashed them in the connector many bikes ago and has now become standard.  The pics don't show it fully populated, or with the rubber seal.  This was during my testing phase.  Right now it's only lacking a single wire, and is properly water sealed.

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On this bike I didn't run a +12v constant, but I may in the future.  I used a nifty 4-sided crimper one of my kids gave me to crimp the deutsch connector pins.  I used my good crimper to do the bullet connectors. Didn't take a pic of the bullets, but here is a spade that I did when inop stalling my relay set.

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I then pinned the other half of the deutsch connector, covered it in techflex and ran it through a drilled hole in the trunk.  I used polyurethane windshield adhesive to seal it up.  I made all my connections in the trunk using adhesive lined heat shrink crimp connectors, and attached it all to the trunk with some self-adhesive felt.

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So that left me with three extra wires; a second ground, a +12v switched and a +12v constant.  I ran these to a 4-pin connector (didn't have a 3-pin when I did the first one so 4 it is) and the other end of that goes to a dual cigarette lighter-dual USB unit that just velcros into whichever trunk I'm using.  This lets me charge phones, GPS, etc. when I'm riding.  The constant goes to an SAE connector for future use.  You can just see the 4-pin connector in the previous picture.

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Now I grabbed a grinder bit and ground a small half-round chunk out of the body behind the seat.  This leaves the bike mostly weathertight, but allows free run for the wires to connect under the seat.

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Weird.  Those are right side up on my ipad and upside down on my computer.  Oh well.  Here's the result.  Running light and turn signal.  Brakes are problematic to photo by myself, but just imagine that little stip at the top lighting up.

[FJmonkey]

Great write up, I think modifications is the proper location. I just have one problem with it... Now I have added one more item to my already long list of mods...

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Thanks!  My original intent way back when is that when I added the bags, (think it was one of my V-Stroms, maybe the first VFR8)  they totally obscured the turn signals and most of the tail/brake lights.  This is a cheap and fairly simple mod that significantly increases visibility, and I like that the turn signals are visible from the side.  Oh yeah, forgot to mention; the first ground comes from the taillight's stock ground, the second ground comes from the right passenger handle mount bolt.  The grounds are combined in the trunk before being split again to make sure that everything has the best ground possible.

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Better pic of the notch