Back to the Project

It's been a while since I did anything to the cafe racer but when I got home from work on Friday, there was a box on the steps. I did a little bit of work on it Friday night but not much. Too tired. Most of the work happened today. Thing hardly looks like a motorcycle at all here. 

One of the things I ordered was a set of gauges. For a while I looked into taking the stock gauges apart, rebuilding them, installing more modern faces, and upgrading to led lighting but that's a lot of work and the gauges would still be...huge. I went back and forth between these 2.5" units and some 1.9" ones. Chrome or black? I ended up going with the 2.5" model and, obviously...black.

A while ago I made a bracket to mount the ignition to. It worked with the larger gauges but with the smaller ones, it was too busy. So I made another one that is fairly well hidden. I wanted the ignition to look like it was floating. I also wanted the ignition to sit down lower and be a third sphere. It's easier to see the ignition now that the huge gauges aren't the focal point.

Much better. I got everything mounted up and then wired the gauges. The tach is easy as it only has 2 wires for the backlighting. The speedo has the same and then a + and - for each of the four led lights (hi beam, turn signals, oil pressure, and neutral). Everything seemed fine here. I don't have turn signals yet so that wire gets capped off. Hi beam is connected but I'm still wrestling with some other wiring so I don't know for sure if that's done correctly. Oil and neutral should be wired correctly but I can't start the motor either and I don't know if that makes a difference (pretty sure on the CB's the idiot light only comes on in the event of low pressure as opposed to most cars that come on with the key).

Next up was wiring in this switch. The previous owner had this bike stripped pretty well. I need/want to have enough stuff on it to keep the police at bay. So I installed a horn, and then started installing this left side control. It has the ability to run turn signals, headlights (hi and low), horn, and kill switch. Initially I was going to drill the bars and run the harness through them to hide things but the harness is damn big and I didn't like the idea of having that big of a hole in the bar. Twice. I did have to shim the bar with some tape to make the switch tight but that was easy.

This...has not been easy. Or fun. In fact...it sucks. Remember...I'm dealing with a 550 frame. 500 motor. I think a 550 harness but Im not sure (I've found a few wires that are colored such that they don't show up on schematics at all). I also don't know if the previous owner wired things the right way to begin with. I'm close to having this done but...it's not done. I've got some calls into some friends in the CB community so hopefully I'll have this squared away in a jiffy here. Stay tuned.