Dual headlights

Has anyone done a dual, side by side headlight mod on a Maxim? I'm thinking of going that route, but having trouble deciding what to do with the mass of wires in the headlight can. I suppose there are several solutions, the easiest of which is to stay with the stock setup. Any ideas?

 

There are many suppliers of weather resistant plastic boxes that can be had for minimum coinage. Sketch out your layout and determine the size you need as well as bracketing and you should be good to go. As I recall, there is a picture in our archives of a memebers rig with dual headlights, you may want to scope it out.

 

Yeh, I found someone that did a stacked dual light setup, but didn't provide close ups of the configuration. The lights I'm looking at are a direct mount using the exitsting brackets, I suppose I'll do as you suggest and look for a housing for the harness connections. Thanks.

 

The mess inside the headlight bucket can be made to virtually disappear.

All those plug-in's are in there to facilitate assembly, removal and make replacement of pigtailed parts easy.
The whole mess can be excised, spliced-up, soldered, heat-shrinked, black taped-up and tucked-away.

On the one hand ... doing so eliminates the mess and possible loose or low resistance issues.

The other hand ... you'll have to un-bundle, un-wrap, and cut the splices if you need to replace a switch, light, remove the instruments or trouble-shoot.

 

I was thinking that, Rick. All those connectors surely eat up a lot of space. I'm thinking I'll heat up the soldering iron and have a party, we'll see what happens.

 

Gad! Don't do that, you may wish to purchase the nifty electrical tool that Pep Boys sells. It is a green hex about two inches across that has six nifty little extraction tools, one on each side, that will remove, non-destructively, a wide variety of electrical contact pins from those pesky plastic housings. I can't seem to find a picture of it but I hope the physical description is sufficient to help you scope it out. I paid less than $7 USD for mine. I even carry one in the truck for emergencies (I'm the one everybody calls at midnight). Should you be interested, I'll try to get a photo sent to you to compare. I would hope you could do this without hacking up the connectors, they are of value to me for restoring or repairing OEM harnesses. Let me know what you have planned.

 

Thanks for the tip. We've had some decent weather lately and I've been riding but when we get into full winter mode and I'm ready to start hacking sht up, I'll keep that in mind. Pep Boys is 2 miles away. They sell a decent fuse block too, that I'm thinking of picking up for ~$5. The PO of my bike decided fuses weren't needed and hacked out the box and black taped all the wires together. Genius, right?

 

Or suicidal maniac. Idiocy knows no bounds. You may wish to pick your replacement fuse block very carefully. I would suggest you find something that can be covered and if at all possible, weather proof. Another thought is, should you care too, send the harness out here with a drawing of what all mods you would like to see incorporated (or hacked out as the case may be) and I could set it up for you.

 

My PO did the same exact thing. In fact they did such a bad job, the headlights didn't work at all when I got it. I ended up picking up a $3.20 part from radio shack ( Link Here ) that after soldering new wires directly to the spade terminals, fit perfectly into the stock fuse block case. A little solder and heatshrink later, and all my electrical problems went away!

 

Use whichever new fuse panel you like. I prefer the 6-circuit one available from Wirewerks.com.

My best piece of advice is to do most of the work - "On the bench."
Solder and shrink some long lengths of wire to ALL the connections on the new panel before actually fitting the new panel on to the bike.

Then, you'll only need to do the splicing of the wires, which you've already attached to the new panel, to their appropriate ends on the harness.

Don't work under the assumption that the ends of the wires removed from the fuse retaining clips on the OLD fuse panel are going to reach their connection points on the NEW fuse panel.

 

Sweet! Thanks for the fuse block link!

 

The plan is to have the harness totally out and on the bench , as I plan on a 80% (pretty much all but the engine removed) disassembly of the whole bike. Thanks for the offer to rework the harness, but I'm gonna go at it myself.

 

Removing the giant headlight and replacing it with something more reasonable like two smaller ones did cross my mind briefly. I also considered changing the headlight bucket and fairing all at once:

http://shorterlink.org/1386