I wanted to replace my original speedometer and tachometer for something more compact. I'm not sure why, but the original 85mph speedometer always bothered me. I guess I felt like the bike deserved better even though I've only pinned it once in 10 years of riding.
After casually looking around and almost pulling the trigger on a cheaper universal speedo with an analog sweep needle for the tach, I stumbled across this product. It can be found in all the usual places such as Amazon and eBay but it's usually buried behind 2 or 3 pages of search results with vastly different prices ranging from mid 40s to mid 80s (US$).
The description typically includes a listing of what each wire is intended to be connected to, but in typical fashion for these kinds of imported products the English translation leaves a lot to be desired.
For example: the product detail notes: "Oil Quantity Indicator" as one of the display areas, but they really mean fuel level (my bike doesn't have a fuel level sensor, so that capability doesn't matter to me).
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| Boot up |
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| Ready |
the wiring description has a few strange phrases that I'm not sure what to make of them but inputs noted as a "signal" wire such as "oil signal" or "Water temperature signal" indicates an input that varies with some resistance value from a sensor.
My bike doesn't have fuel level or water temp sensors, so both of these can be ignored. The speedo does not have an Oil pressure warning light, but it looks like I can attach that output to the check engine light and maybe even a few other places just to catch my eye if that light ever triggers (ABS and 6th gear maybe? NOTE: energizing more than 1 gear at a time results in only the higher gear showing).
update: I ultimately decided to only energize the check engine light because it looks more obvious when just the 1 icon is lit instead of 2 or 3.
This must be a newer and improved version of the speedometer that I almost bought because the instructions for the cheap speedo found all over the Internet seem to work for this including how to access the programming screens. This improves my chances of a successful install by a bunch!
For the older version, folks were grounding out the fuel input to stop the fuel gauge from flashing when they didn't have a fuel sensor on their bike. This gauge doesn't light up any area that is not energized so my fuel area remains blank if I don't connect that wire.
There are quite a few youtube videos of people talking about their installation experience with the older speedo. here are a few for reference:
TIP: front tire circumference is diameter in mm x 3.142
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| Programming instructions - found on the net |
Update: There was a black wire with a brown stripe that connects the neutral light with the fuse panel on the handlebars. I had it originally connected to the green ground but that ended up blowing the Neutral/Oil pressure light fuse so I left it disconnected after hunting for the short for a few days. I have no idea why that short didn't start blowing fuses until after I accidentally started it in gear.
It didn't look like I had much clearance on the left side to mount the speed sensor, so I fabricated a bracket to attach to an axle pinch bolt after staring at the problem for a while. I used some of the sheet stock scraps I had laying on the bench from the battery tray project and cut a right angle (1" x 1.5") bracket. Trimmed it a bit to get the sizing about right, then smoothed the corners and drilled the holes for mounting and got the sensor to line up fairly close with the magnet on the first try.
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| Big washer added for support but not needed |
I reused the original dual gauge bracket because I needed a way to mount the new speedometer, but due to the shape, it had to be cut in half and joined with some flat bar stock. I also needed to bend the brackets a little to improve the viewing angle of the new combo-unit.
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| I'm a grinder, not a welder |
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| New bracket ready for install |
I cut the connector off the old instrument cluster leaving enough room to allow everything to be reconnected if necessary at a later time (I can't think of a good reason to go back, but I can't say what I may want to do with this bike later on).
The installation was very straight forward. The most difficult aspects are the fabrication of the mount for the gauge and the speed sensor. Spacing of the magnets must be even, if you have 2 they need to be 180 degrees from each other. I made the mistake of gluing the magnets to 2 of the 5 bolts on the wheel/rotor but since the spacing is not 180 degrees the speed reading would fluctuate 1 MPH as the differing pulses are read from the irregularly spaced magnets. My solution is to use only 1 magnet because I didn't have 5 to space out evenly. I could glue the magnets somewhere else but I'll just run 1 magnet and see how it goes. I can easily pickup a pack of 5 or 6 rare earth magnets from Home Depot so I won't worry about it for now.
I need to measure my tire circumference a little more accurately, but using 2138mm for now I know it's close but want to make sure because the odometer seems to read a mile a little further than I expect.
Edit: apparently actual tire circumference is not the number required for this circumference setting since the GPS indicated speed was 5 less than what I measured. Trying 2000 as the tire circumference to get within 2mph of GPS speed. I suspect using the diameter measurement for the magnet setting vs the tire setting is more accurate.
The display gets a little washed out in bright light and the turn signals don't blink when the indicator is on. I'm going to try to reposition the speedometer to get it to sit a little lower because it seems a bit high in my field of vision.
The turn signal indicators just light up and don't blink, I've read that installing a resistor on each signal in parallel should do the trick so I purchased a couple of 220ohm 1 watt resistors for a few bucks on eBay. (I went by the article I found since I didn't know how to calculate the resistor value I needed) but I'm not really happy with the long on time with a quick blink. I may try a higher value resister later down the road.
I initially thought that the tach was a little slow to respond, but when I compare it to the original tach, I discovered that the new tach will hit 4k rpm on a throttle blip as the original tach slowly climbed but never made it to that RPM before the engine speed started falling so while it might feel a little sluggish, it actually responds more quickly than the original tachometer.
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