Bike is a 1974 R90/6. Front end was damaged in a collision with a cow 11 years ago. Forks and handlebars were bent; headlight, speedo and tacho trashed etc. As it happens, I never much liked the headlight and instrument binnacle anyway – too Japanese looking, IMO.
Anyway, repairs have been through a few iterations, using a couple of different headlights, an Acewell speedo and two different bicycle speedos, a couple of different ignition switches and so on. All this involved hacking into the wiring, often without much care, and the time came to fit something proper and tidy things up a bit.
So, I bought a new headlight bucket from a CJ750 (Chang Jiang). These are cheap, cheerful and brutish objects, but with potential. US$65 on eBay. I’ve had one of these before but it was very badly made – the ‘ear mounts’ were out of symmetry by about 10mm and it offended me. So here’s my new one as received, but with my new Speedhut speedo having a trial fitting.
The speedo: Speedhut is a US mob with a huge range of instruments. You can customise the appearance - colours, fonts, artwork, whatever. There are many options, but I chose a simple GPS speedo with no idiot lights. It cost around $300 delivered to Oz, and arrived well packed with a reasonably good instruction sheet. Here’s what you get:
The black lump is the satellite receiver. It is attached to 5 metres of coax cable. Speedhut suggests that to fit the unit into a car the receiver could be simply attached to the roof – it is magnetic. Or it could be sat on the front or rear shelf, looking through glass. Covering it with metal would prevent the satellite signal from being received, but glass and wood are ok. I chose to chop a hole in the headlight bucket and fit it there, covering the hole with … something. So, the bucket needed some work. Holes were added, enlarged or bogged up. The front chrome ring was particularly roughly made so it needed some bog too.
Once primed and puttied it was painted with matte black epoxy enamel (rattlecan) to suit the rest of the paintwork. I had bought new idiot lights and for switches had decided to go with two push-on push-off toggle switches, one for ignition and the other for lights.
The satellite receiver sits on a strip of galv steel supported by the two switches. Inside the bucket I decided to ditch the old terminal board in favour of a couple of terminal busses. One has 3 x 6 gang terminals and the other has 4 x 4 gang terminals. I also needed a plastic terminal strip to join some individual wires (not shown in this pic)
Ok, here is how it looks with everything wired up. It's pretty busy in there with the idiot lights, two relays, the switches, the speedo connections and so on. But there is also enough room that I don't need to use my knee to get the headlight in place, and I still have the 5 metres of coax nestled in there. I'll get that shortened soon.
And to cover the hole where the satellite receiver sits I indulged my appreciation of the Slash Five aesthetic by making a fake wooden 'ignition switch'. I have some nice old spruce that I've used to make the pack rack and side covers for the old girl, so whittled up the 'switch' from that. I also used a bit of redgum cut from a piece of firewood to mimic the /5 switch latch.
Conclusion: I'm delighted. The speedo needle is servo driven so is really smooth in operation. The speedo will also tell you your direction of travel and height above sea level and a bunch of other things I'm not really interested in. I believe it is extremely accurate but haven't had the chance yet to test that with another GPS. Speedhut claims that the receiver will be getting between 5 and 7 blips per second from the satellites. I connected the optional 'always hot' wire to the speedo. This means that it will remember its position for around four hours, so will fire up almost immediately. When starting from cold it takes a minute or so to get the initial position. After using the Acewell and bicycle speedos it is a pleasure to be looking at an analogue needle speedo again.
Aesthetically I am also very pleased. Brunhilde is looking much tidier, and I've added some extra useful things like a voltmeter and power outlets for charging devices and camping lights and so on.
