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Old 30-09-2019, 06:19 PM   #1009
350TSS
Too much time on my hands member
 
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Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: Shipbourne
Bike: M900
Posts: 1,417
Some days, even though you spend a good few hours on a task and not much actual progress is made, you feel satisfied with the result because it turned out better than you expected. Yesterday was one of those days.
All I achieved was to get the number plate mount attached to the seat, and the mounting arrangements for the rear view camera and the all the rear lights sorted. This included the wiring routes and the means by which the seat can be quickly detachable. By keeping the number plate /rear light cluster mount semi- permanently attached to the seat both can be completely removed by a quarter turn of a 4mm allen key and the separation of I x 5 way amp connector and 2 camera cable connectors. All the wiring and associated connectors will be contained within the protected space of the seat hump and every transition through a CF panel is protected (semi sealed) by a rubber grommet (rather rubber blanking plugs converted into grommets).
The trouble with purpose designed grommets is that if you want a grommet over a 5mm cable the hole you have to drill is something like 12mm. The problem I had was that the camera cables had coax connectors 11mm diameter which needed a minimum 20mm hole for a proper grommet and in a lightweight construction like my rear number plate a couple of 20mm holes would seriously weaken the integrity of the structure. Also because a proper grommet is quite inelastic the hole through the middle had to be big enough to allow the largest connector and the other cables to pass through, so about 12mm but the actusl cables only amounted to c8mm so the grommet would not seal.
I used rubber electrical box blanking plugs and punched an appropriate sized hole I needed according to the size of the cable, these only required an 8mm size hole in the CF as the blanking plug was sufficiently elastic once the hole was punched to stretch over the large coax connectors. Undoubtedly the cable is less well protected against the CF edge but I am sure they will be OK long term particularly if the cable is adequately supported either side of the “grommet”.
The part I was most proud of doing yesterday was this:

The problem was to find a means of getting the rear wiring loom into the rear seat hump whilst limiting/preventing water ingress and reducing the chance of the CF chafing the cable loom (about 8mm diameter but with a 5 way AMP connector (hole required 40mm x 19mm) which if the seat was to be removable had to be extracted from the hump and disconnected).
I used a scrap bit of CF, some 20mm plastic electrical conduit with a groove machined to take an “O“ring. The machined plastic conduit was inserted into a 20mm hole cut in the CF and bonded in. Some closed cell rubber was inserted inside the tube to form a soft holder for the cable and then the complete component was cut in half with a hacksaw.
Two pivot holes were drilled 3mm at the apex of each half. And a small piece of 3mm polypropylene was cut to act as a friction free guide for the opening of the two “doors”. The “o” ring will be stretched over the AMP connector and once the loom was pushed into the seat hump will be rolled back over the two halves of the electrical conduit keeping the CF “doors” latched. Took some time to think through and make but pleased with the elegance of the solution, no additional bolts and 5 seconds to extract the connector.
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