Under the left glove box of many a GoldWing is a a tangle of unsecured electrical cables and dodgy connections. Wingers are better at some things than others and accessory wiring isn’t always one of them. This article provides some guidance on safe and tidy ways to add accessories and display lighting to your GoldWing’s electrics.

Connecting 12 volt accessories or lighting to a GoldWing is not especially dangerous or difficult and it’s well within the capacity of a reasonably practical individual to do it, and to do it without creating a “rats nest” of loose wires and dodgy connections.

It takes more care and trouble to do it properly and it helps if you have learned some of the basic do’s and dont’s of auto-electrical work, but it isn’t rocket science and any reasonably practical individual can make a decent enough job providing he (or she) takes the trouble to learn.

It is however worth mentioning that even though low voltage (only 12 volts) circuits on motorcycles cannot cause hazardous electrical shocks, short circuits and component failures can cause electrical fires unless circuits, especially accessory circuits which the owner is adding, are designed to prevent them.

GoldWing Fire Damage - Picture by Davolous

Fire Avoidance

The risk of fires is easily avoided by installing suitable fuses into your accessory wiring circuits but it is a real one; if wires connected to a 12 volt motorcycle battery get trapped and nipped (or a component they are connected to fails) causing a short circuit, very high currents will flow and the wires will almost instantly get very hot, melt their insulation and may even set fire to something – including petrol!

For this reason all wiring circuits on a bike should have a suitably sized fuse incorporated into it and the fuse should be as close as possible to the power source of the circuit.  So, never neglect to incorporate fuses into your circuits.  More about fuses and how to choose and install them later, for now it is enough to emphasise their importance.

Apart from this vital safety requirement, as long as you can work reasonably neatly and methodically there is no reason why any moderately practical individual cannot make up and install 12v power circuits for lighting and other accessories on a GoldWing.

A simple accessory circuit

12 volt Accessory Circuits are simple

Your GoldWing’s electrical system operates on 12 volts direct current (12v DC) so the electricity flows only one way.

Effectively each accessory on the bike which draws electrical power is connected into a circuit of cable which allows electricity to flow from one side of the bike’s battery to the other through that accessory, allowing the accessory to extract energy and make use of it.

A circuit therefore consists, as in this illustration,  of a cable connecting the positive side of the battery to a fuse, then to a switch, then to the accessory and finally back to the other side of the battery. The battery’s stored energy is used to push the electricity around the circuit and the energy flowing through the accessory is used to make it work – in the case of a lighting accessory it get s converted into the light which is emitted, in the case of a horn it becomes sound. Simple!

Of course it isn’t always that simple on a GoldWing and some of the 12v DC circuits which the manufacturer has incorporated into the GL1800 are far more complicated. But for purposes of adding lighting and other accessories to our bikes we needn’t worry about those complexities at all as long as we steer clear of them. We can use simple power circuits as described above, with only relatively minor variations, for all our practical needs.

Basic Principles

Making a safe. reliable and tidy job of accessory wiring should take account of the following:

• Work out what you could need in way of extra switches, fuses, relays and cables you would need to install all the accessories and extra lighting you might eventually want on your bike and plan your switch positions and accessory circuits accordingly, even if you then do the work in stages.
• Decide which types of switch you will need and which accessories you will need to be able to switch on or off while riding, then prioritise the switch locations.
• Use a consistent approach each time you create an accessory circuit; it will make it easier to diagnose faults.
• Always incorporate fuses in the accessory circuits you create.
• Use relays to control circuits which involve substantial electrical loads, such as fog lights, strobes or horns.
• Think long and hard before you interfere with any part of the bike’s ordinary wiring circuits.
• Work out what type of switches and what size of cable and fuse and whether to use a relay with reference to the current which will flow in each accessory circuit; don’t just guess.
• Ensure that all the connections you make are sound and durable, which usually means making proper crimped connections.
• Incorporate service connectors in your cable runs where necessary, to allow you to dismantle the bike without cutting any cables.
• Make diagrams and notes of what you have done and where you have put things on the bike, so you can refer to them when something stops working.

We’ll put some flesh on these bones in due course in this series of Articles but for now lets look at some easy options and also some pitfalls.

Big Bike Fog Light Kit

Plug and Play Kits

Some electrical accessories come as kits which are supplied with their own power leads, fuses and switches, so that they can simply be connected to the battery and used, simple as that.  Heated clothing usually fits into this category.

Other complete kits require installation but they simply plug into matching sockets which have been incorporated into the bike’s standard wiring loom, so there is no requirement for wiring up at all.  Fog light kits for US Specification GL1800s fall into his category – but not that the kits do need to be adapted and wired in for UK Specification bikes.

Accessories which are supplied with a power lead, fuse and an in-line switch,  such as heated clothing, do the job more or less perfectly and there would be no point in wiring up your own version.  You can connect them to your bike’s battery and use them during Winter and take them off  for storage during the Summer.

For example at Knutsford Honda’s Chrome Crazy Day recently a Winger who had endured a miserably cold ride over the Pennines to get there was able to buy a half price pair of heated gloves, attach the terminals of the wiring kit which came with them directly to his bike’s battery terminals using nothing more than a screwdriver and enjoy a much more comfortable ride home. And even as a Yorkshireman he thought they were a good buy at half price!

If you install an accessory kit of this sort as instructed and make sure the cables aren’t likely to get nipped anywhere or present a hazard by dangling untidily in a loop which could get snagged by something, this should be perfectly safe.

It isn’t good practice to install lots and lots of such kits directly to the battery (and especially not to the bike’s accessory terminals) because you will end up with quite an untidy tangle of cables and switching your accessories on and off might become a bit impractical, but in principle it will at least be safe and it will work.

Some manufacturers of heated clothing offer garments which can be inter-connected so they can share the same power connection lead, which simplifies things – although you might want to check whether this arrangements means everything has to be either on or off at the same time, which might not be ideal.

An integrated approach of this sort can however provide a safe, sensible and durable installation without the need for any connection or alteration to the bike’s own electrical system – with the additional advantage that you can remove the whole set-up during the warmer months simply by disconnecting the single battery cable.

There are also plug-and-play kits available commercially which allow you to add LED lighting to trunk and saddlebag trims by connecting it (quite easily and safely) to the bike’s existing tail light wiring. Likewise there are kits for interior trunk lights and many other things.

Providing the kit you buy is suitable for your particular model of GoldWing (even among GL1800s there are differences) and you follow the instructions carefully, these ready-to-fit kits are a safe prospect.

Pitfalls

But there are pitfalls and it is important to check that the kit is suitable for your GoldWing, especially if it is designed for the US market, because not all kits for US GoldWings can be used (or at least used safely) on UK specification GoldWings.

Fog light kits are an example of the need to tread carefully. US specification GL1800 GoldWings have a wiring loom which includes plugs to which fog lights or driving lights as sold in kits can be connected directly, as well as a blanked-off hole to which the switch can be fitted and a nearby ready-made connection for it too. But there is a different fog light kit for an airbag model GL1800 because it has a different switch. Even if you own a US Specification GL1800 you have to take care that the kit you are buying wil fit your particular bike.

And fitting fog light kits to UK Specification GL1800s is even more challenging. The blanked off hole to mount the switch is provided but nothing else, so you will need to install suitable additional wiring yourself – and as the following cautionary tale indicates, this has to be done very carefully and without messing about with the bike’s existing wiring loom.

A Cautionary Tale

A GoldWing’s wiring loom is a complex and carefully designed whole and any attempt to add additional lights or accessories to it can cause serious problems, including an electrical fire. There are exceptions such as those described above, but let the following story serves as a warning to tread carefully, even with ready-to-fit kits.

As already mentioned, adding Fog Lights to a US spec GL1800 is relatively straight forward because the bike’s wiring loom has provision for them and the Fog light Kits are sold with matching plugs and switches. You can literally bolt them on, plug them in and install the switch in the blanked-off hole provided for it on the bike and away you go. The instructions are easy to follow too. It’s not difficult if you buy the correct kit for your model and follow the instructions.

One of the mechanics at a well known GoldWing Specialist Dealer decided to install a fog light kit his own way. He drew the power for the fog lights by splicing a cable into the bike’s dipped headlight circuit, presumably reasoning that it was desirable to allow the fog lights to work only when the headlights are switched on, as is conventional practice when installing fog lights on cars.

He spliced in his cable downstream of the relay which powers the dipped headlights at the relay box under the bike’s seat and routed it to the fog light switch and from the switch directly to the fog lamps.

Whether he read the fog light kit instructions or considered the capacity of the dipped headlight circuit (or of the fog light switch) to carry the load of two 35 watt fog lights is uncertain. The bike he was working on was a US Specification model, so it had provision in the wiring loom for the fog lights to be connected to plugs right by where they were to be installed, likewise the fog light switch (and the relay which comes with the kit) could have been simply plugged in. The mechanic chose to cut all these plugs off and run his own cables instead. The full load of the fog lights (35 watts each, so a total of at least 6 amps, probably rising to 7 or 8 amps at the alternator’s full working voltage of 14.3, was therefore passing through the fog lamp switch as well as being added to the dipped headlamp circuit and therefore overloading it.

Surprisingly the fog lights worked without blowing the dipped headlamp circuit’s fuse; fuse sizes go up in quantum leaps (5, 7.5, 10, 15 etc) and the headlamp fuse at 15 amps was just big enough to cope with the extra load. But after a while both the fog lights and the dipped headlights stopped working, even though the fuse hadn’t blown. It was quite a puzzle and it took two mechanics ten hours to find the cause.

Drawing this additional power from the headlamp circuit had caused knock-on effects elsewhere in the bike’s wiring loom. It had overloaded, and therefore overheated and eventually burnt out, a diode buried deep in the bikes wiring loom under the trunk. They found it because it had caused visible charring of the whole wiring loom within which it was contained.

This diode doesn’t feature in the wiring diagram in the bike’s service manual and its role in this remote part of the circuit is obscure. (For those of you who think you understand auto-electrics and like a puzzle, once the diode had failed and the bike’s dipped headlights had failed with it, the headlights came on again while reverse gear was engaged!

Even professional motorcycle mechanics, although perhaps in this case one who had limited auto-electrical knowledge and skill, can cause serious problems by breaking into a GoldWing’s standard wiring circuits to install accessories. So unless you really known what you’re doing and have calculated the impact of any additional load you will be imposing very carefully, don’t do it!

And the mechanic made two important mistakes in his approach to this installation, not one. Relatively high power devices like fog lamps will overload a relatively small capacity operating switch such as the one supplied as part of a fog lamp kit. Sooner or later the fog lamp switch would have burned out because it had been wired up to carry the full working load of the fog lamps rather than the much smaller current necessary to energise the relay with which the kit was supplied and the switch intended to operate.

The lessons of this story are compellingly clear:

1. If you are installing an accessory kit, make sure it’s the right one for the bike and then read the instructions and follow them.
2. If you need to adapt a kit to a non-standard use and therefore create your own accessory wiring circuit then don’t, repeat don’t, add substantial extra loads to the bike’s existing wiring circuits without carefully calculating the consequences.
3. Unless you really know what you are doing, it’s best not to interfere with the bike’s standard wiring loom, switches and circuits at all. Additional lighting and accessories are best installed using completely separate circuits, as described below.

Fog Light Switch in place

Fitting Fog Lights safely

The safe way to fit fog lights to a UK Specification GL1800 is to create a separately fused and switched circuit which incorporates a relay to handle the switching of the relatively high current which will flow when the lights are on.

The US Kit’s fog lights, mounting frames and the special switch can be used.  You may also use the relay which comes with the kit  but you may find it simpler install one of your own instead, grouped with other relays you may be installing nearer the battery, so under the seat.

The fog light switch should be connected (via a fuse, so from the bike’s Accessory Terminals) ) and then to the relay (which draws power separately via its own fused, heavier cable to the battery) which is then connected to the fog lamps themselves.  The return cable from the fog lamps to the bike’s frame (and therefore to the negative side of the battery) needs to be able to carry the full working load of the fog lamps, so it needs to be a heavier one too.

Using the bike’s Accessory Terminals to supply the fog light switch (but not the lamps themselves) ensures that the fog lights can’t be left on when the bike’s ignition is turned off. What you cannot do safely is power the fog lights entirely from the bike’s accessory terminals, because this would overload them and blow their fuse. You have to use a relay, i.e. an electrical switch which uses the energy in one circuit to switch on another, higher power, circuit to supply the lamps themselves.

Accessory Circuit using a Relay

Relays are really useful

This technique, of using a relay, an electrical switch which can deal with a heavy load, allows the use of small, neat switches, which can only carry small loads, to operate relatively high power accessories such as fog lights, heated clothing, horns and groups (i.e. lots of) display lights.

You don’t need to understand how a relay works to make use of the idea; all you need to know is which pair of terminals does the switching and which pair gets switched. Relays have numbered terminals, so it isn’t difficult to get this right.

But if you’re curious, and you can remember a little of what you were probably taught in science at school, a relay has a solenoid inside it and that’s what does the switching.  A small electrical current flows through a coil of wire wrapped around a magnet and this makes the magnet move.  When it moves the magnet closes a pair of electrical contacts which switches on the more powerful circuit, through which a bigger electrical current (eg enough to power the fog lights) can safely flow.  When the small electrical current to the relay is interrupted (when the manual control switch is turned off) the magnet springs back and the power to the fog lights is disconnected.

So fog lights are powered from a relay, which switches the power on and off in response to a separate, low-power circuit which incorporates the operating switch.  And this separate control circuit is powered from the bike’s Accessory Terminals, so the fog lights won’t work when the bike’s ignition key is taken out.   Simple!

Hitachi Connectors - from Electrical Connection

The Bike’s Accessory Terminals and Connector

All GoldWings are fitted, as standard, with a pair of terminal at the main fusebox which are designed to allow you to connect electrical accessories or extra lighting. They are only “live” when the ignition is on (or switched to “ACC”) so whatever you connect to these terminals will not work otherwise. This is very useful because it provides an easy way of ensuring that your accessories cannot be left switched on and therefore cannot drain the battery.

However the Accessory Terminals are fused at 5 amps, which limits what you can connect to them. For example they wouldn’t cope with a pair of fog lights, which draw at least 6 amps; they would blow the 5 amp fuse. Likewise heated bike clothing will often draw more than 5 amps, which is why that comes with a power lead (which incorporates its own fuse) for connection directly to the bike’s battery.

The Accessory Terminals will however cope with low power devices like a Satellite Navigator or a speed camera detector, so these can be powered directly from the Accessory Terminals. And these devices have an on/off switch built into them (as many do) and they come with their own power lead which incorporates an in-line fuse, a direct connection can be made without any other provision. You may find that the power lead which is supplied is too short to allow you to mount the device where you would like to on your GoldWing but it should be possible to extend it if necessary.

The GL1800 comes with a built-in accessory power socket in the space below the left glovebox; it is protected by the same 5 amp fuse as the Accessory Terminals on the fusebox, so anything you connect to it contributes to the total of 5 amps which this circuit can supply.

You can purchase the Hitachi-type connectors which are necessary to plug into this power source and you can connect one or more low power accessories to it, just as you can to to the Accessory Terminals themselves.  The total load (of both together) must not exceed 5 amps otherwise the bike’s Accessory Fuse (on the main fuse board) will blow.

Note however that if your low power device doesn’t come with it’s own internal or in-line fuse you should consider adding an in-line fuse yourself. This is because your device may draw only a very small current (less than one amp) and therefore be supplied with a relatively thin power cable.

The Owner plans to replace this temporary switch panel

Don’t get carried away, think Resale Value

You should also think about the implications of switch and accessory location for the resale value of your bike.

In general don’t drill holes or install switches anywhere which is easily visible on the bike if they cannot easily be removed without trace.  Same applies to locating display lighting too; better to tuck it away so that illuminates the bike in darkness but doesn’t substantially alter its appearance in daylight.

If you sell your bike privately your accessories and wiring might be seen by the buyer to have value and therefore help to sell it and perhaps add to its value.  Alternatively if you’ve stuck an ugly or cheap-looking switch in a conspicuous place it will be to the bike’s detriment.

Dealers tend not to trust DIY accessory wiring on any GoldWing which they take in part exchange; they haven’t done it themselves and they don’t want to have to fix any faults which might arise under the guarantee they will offer with your bike when they sell it on.  This is partly because they would have to ferret around to do the fault finding; there is no standard system for accessory wiring and few if any owners will hand on a diagram of what has been done which the fault-finder could work from.

Dealers may therefore rip out all DIY electrical accessories and associated wiring as a matter of routine, no matter whether it is currently working and how well it might appear to have been installed before putting any used bike up for sale.  (They might even remove any non-electrical accessories which won’t leave conspicuous holes, so they can sell the new owner new ones!)

Having seen the tangled mess which some DIY wiring on GoldWings can be, this “scorched earth” policy makes some sense, even though it will also appear to be potentially wasteful.

There is another side to this coin too because dealers who do this won’t necessarily return the bike to the manufacturer’s specification by replacing any damaged or dodgy parts.  So when you are thinking of buying a used GoldWing from a dealer, one of the things you should look carefully for is evidence of accessories having been removed leaving hole or other damage.

A recent example I came across involved rusting former mounting bolts being put back in place to fill in holes which the removal of a set of front fork lights would otherwise have left in the brake covers of a GL1800.  It wouldn’t have looked so bad if they had used new bolts.

The need to look before you buy is especially true for newcomers to GoldWings, who may be less likely to know what might have been removed from where on a GoldWing and which panels are prone to damage from repeated removal and therefore where to look for evidence of unrepaired faults or bodging up.  At least if you spot something before you buy it will at least provide a basis for haggling for replacement accessories or something off the price.

Look on the Bright Side!

Having said all that, don’t be discouraged from buying and fitting electrical accessories and display lighting on your GoldWing because that’s an important part of the enjoyment of the bike for many UK owners.

The GoldWing Light Parade through Blackpool Illuminations started in 2002 and has become a really spectacular success, involving hundreds of brightly illuminated GoldWings riding past thousands of admiring spectators along the Promenade through the Town’s own famous Illuminations on the first weekend in September each year.

And other GoldWing Light Parades have started taking place in UK too in recent years as interest has grown in making GoldWings eye-catching by night as well as by day.  Quiet seaside Towns can’t provide quite the same setting for a Light Parade as Blackpool Illuminations and its crowds of visitors, but UK Wingers have come to enjoy showing off their display lights as well as their bikes any chance they get.

Next Article

Part 2 of this Series deals with choosing and locating switches.

A list of  UK suppliers will be provided in the final part of the Series.