The whole bike with work in progress - lights mounted at this point, no wiring done. Body work & the fuel tank must be removed to allow access to run the wires - not to much trouble on this bike, which is nice.
We start with spaghetti. The lights are already physically mounted - you can see a coil of wire for the right one sitting on the cooling fins of the right cylinder. The Denali stuff includes the controller (rectangular box) visible on the orange mat beyond the right peg, power leads designed to connect direct to the battery terminals (the +ve has an in-line fuse - direct connection is not the best arrangement, but it does make that part of things easy), a lead to the handlebar switch, a lead for the sensor wire (more on that later), and a power feed for each of the two lights.
That's a new air filter (orange rectangular thing) sitting in the intake opening to the airbox. Since I had the tank off, I decided to have a peek at the filter, even tho I'm still 5,000 km from the scheduled check. Guess what... there was no fricken filter on the bike, probably from the time the factory packed it up for Canada... FU@K! I called the dealer. He claimed they'd never checked since first a/f service is at 20,000 km. Said he'd call the previous owner to see if he'd been in there, but he doubted it. Me too - looked like I was the first one under the tank. I got the dealer to give me a free oil filter & some fasteners I needed, but god knows what's gone in there since the bike's been on the road. Another in a long series of fiascoes I've had with this bike & Toronto BMW.
Close-up of Denali D2 LED light & wire. I ran the D2 wires along the existing harness paths as closely as possible. Mounting the lights on the bar was a pain and running the wire took the better part of a fine summer day. I wanted the lights fixed to the frame instead of riding the bumps with the front wheel and I wanted them higher and more widely spaced than caliper mounting would have allowed, which is why I chose to mount them on the bars instead of the calipers. But it was more work to jury rig my own mounts.
Looking down on the extra wire, which I coiled & packed between the air box & the electronics units. You can see the weatherproof connectors that mate the leads from the lights to the leads from the Denali controller. The plastic wrap is to keep the two fuel lines clear of crap while I'm working.
Small rectangular Denali control box, mounted right side of the bike, just aft of the right cylinder air feed. This was the trickiest item to locate a home for - lots of pulling, re-thinking & trying again, but it was worth the time. I'm happy with it here. The goal is to find a location that allows all the leads flow naturally from that little box, especially the ones going to the battery terminals, while still keeping it tucked away safe & snug. Just below & to the right of the Denali box, note the two fasteners for the power leads - the way the wires are taped makes fitting the whole thing awkward, so time & patience pays off. Best take your frustration out in kicking the dog later or something.
Another view of where the extra wire is gathered up.
Looking down on a Positap connector (provided with the kit) to get at the bike's aux socket power line - I'm lazy when it comes to this stuff & that was the most accessible wire to tap - the Denali controller uses the presence of voltage to determine if the lights can be lit via the handlebar switch (i.e., the bike or ignition must be on or we are within 90 seconds of turning off the bike). Note the cheesy glue-gun approach to seal the Positap connector. There are two configurations for the lights - in the first, one of the Denali sensor wires is tapped into the bike high-beam line to give the Denali box a signal to dim or raise the brightness as the bike high beam switch is used, and the other sensor is tapped into any other switched power source (to feed a relay I presume is inside the controller box that allows the Denali handlebar switch to work as the on/off for the D2's). In the other simpler configuration, the Denali lights operate full-time high intensity only, the bike high-beam switch works as normal and the Denali switch continues to serve as on/off for the D2's. For the latter, you join the two sensor leads from the Denali controller & connect them to any switched power source, which is what I did. If you are a masochist, you can go with the first option to allow dimming, but I was not up for the bother and if I can kill the D2's and still keep the normal bike beams, that's enough control for me. I also wanted to be able to run the D2's on high without having the bike beam on high, which you can't do in the first configuration. It's not clear to me why Twisted Throttle doesn't simply include a dual function switch to achieve even greater flexibility - you could then run the D2's high or low regardless of where the bike high beam switch is sitting.
Denali D2 switch (round button), in "off" position. Engine is on. I mounted the switch on velcro instead of sticking it direct to the bar. The kit includes adhesive tape already on the switch, but the switch has a flat back & there's really not a suitable mating flat surface for it on the bike. Plus, velcro means I can relocate the switch or remove it if the bars ever need to come off. I angled the switch to make for easy viewing of the status LEDs it contains. Strangely, the "on" indicator glows amber & the "off" indicator glows green. Go figure...
Done at long last (and with thanks to the Haynes manual that made getting under the tank a relatively easy task). The engine is idling in this shot.
D2's without sidelight - this is after engine shutdown. Given how I wired them, they'll run on the aux circuit for 90 seconds, until the bike computer turns it off.
D2's with sidelight - this is with ignition on, before engine start-up. They can be turned off via the switch at any time.
Denali D2's... from behind where the saddle goes. You can see the power leads for them beside/under the main battery leads.
Denali D2's... bike is fully shut down. And yes, I drilled through the Motech bars to install this way - the only reason I even have those ugly things is to mount highway pegs, which I was careful to ensure would not be rendered inconvenient by where I located the lights. The bike already had cylinder head caps installed.
And that's all she wrote, ladies & gents.
