Hiding Electronics on a Felt Canvas (Work in Progress)

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GoldenSprocket

New Member
May 15, 2012
29
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0
Southern California
Hello...

After putting the bike together I am now starting to tackle the aesthetics of the electronics and wiring.

I already used the brake noodle trick on the clutch cable to redirect it past the carb, where it can meet up with the throttle cable. They are currently zip tied together, but I will be shrink wrapping them when I get to it.

I decided to move the CDI and wiring to underneath the engine, where it will be mostly out of the way.

To start I went to the local auto parts store and picked up one relatively long spark plug wire with nice rubbery boot, for like $7. The one I got has a carbon core but seems to work fine.

I zip tied the CDI to the frame and after fitting the new (longer and higher quality) plug wire to the CDI, then zip tied the plug wire to the chain guard. I need to deal with the exposed wires, but ran out of time for today.

Here are some before and after pics... The fender was just in place to see how it it would look, but is not currently installed.

More to come...Any suggestions more than welcome!
 

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bairdco

a guy who makes cool bikes
Aug 18, 2009
6,537
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living the dream in southern california
nice to see someone putting my ideas to good use...:)

i don't run kill switches, so i remove the white wire completely. and i use different throttles, so i get rid of all that mess. some kill switches don't use the white wire anyway, so you can just un-solder it and forget it.

if you are gonna run the kill switch on the throttle, you can cut all that cheap black plastic wire covering off and heat shrink it all the way. get some of the smallest zip ties you can so they're not as noticeable. you should be able to find some that match the color of your bike, too.

some cdi's have longer blue and black wires than others. if yours are long enough, you can un-solder the blue wire on the magneto and re-solder the cdi right in, and put a new lug on the black ground coming from the cdi.

if they're not long enough and you have to solder them together, stagger them. i mean, cut the blue one an inch shorter than the black on the engine, and an inch longer on the cdi. that way, when you solder them together, they're not on top of each other and they don't make one big lump.

get two sizes of heat shrink. one for each individual wire where you soldered them, and bigger stuff to go over both wires.

the hard part is heat shrinking the whole thing without missing a spot.

my method is;

cut a few small sections first, about 2". slide those over both wires to the cdi and shrink them on.

then, pull that white cloth wire cover and the rubber grommet off the engine, and slide another piece of heat shrink over both wires as far as it'll go, then shrink that, too.

put the rubber grommet back on and slide it up as far as you can.

take two more short pieces and slide them up over the part you already shrank, and squish it up as far as you can. don't shrink it yet!

add a small piece of single wire shrink to each wire, then solder your wires tigether.

shrink the small stuff over your staggered connections, shrink it, the slide one big piece down, shrink it, then the other.

if you did it right, the big pieces overlap, there's no ugly solder lump, and you didn't miss a spot.

it's a lot of work for something no one will ever notice, but that's the point. everyone notices an ugly black box with a mess of wires curled up and ziptied to your downtube in plain sight, but no one even knows you have a cdi when it's hidden...
 
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GoldenSprocket

New Member
May 15, 2012
29
0
0
Southern California
nice to see someone putting my ideas to good use...:)

it's a lot of work for something no one will ever notice, but that's the point. everyone notices an ugly black box with a mess of wires curled up and ziptied to your downtube in plain sight, but no one even knows you have a cdi when it's hidden...
Yeah, I am really stoked about the brake noodle treatment. That turned out really well!

I dig all the details for the shrink wrap usage... Love shrink wrap!

I don't think I will get to make much headway on the wiring and whatnot until I get back from a trip to Sedona, but I will post more eventually.

Thank you for the good info!!