Some years ago, I posted a story on the BMWSportTouring.com website, about electrifying a tankbag. In that thread, I showed the end results of a project to incorporate my Autocom, V-1, XM Radio and bike-to-bike radio all into a tankbag, with room to spare. I thought I'd share that story here as well.
Unfortunately, the Big Mak tankbag I have is NLA, but the electronics are solid and the design still holds up, so most of this can be applied to other tankbags on the market. I'm still an Autocom fan (wireless sound quality just can't compete), and I can't seem to break it no matter what. I've had the same Autocom unit for close to 8 years, and bought two used units as backups. Probably wasted my money. So, here goes. Captions are ABOVE the related photo.
----------
My first stop was at the hobby store for some wood. A small 6" x 12" piece of 3/32 birch plywood and some 3/8? square dowel strips and some 3/8x1/2 rectangular strips (pine, I believe). The narrower strips would be glued on as a reinforcing perimeter and the bigger strips would be cut to make the stand-off posts. Total investment so far, about $8.
Some time spent with a jigsaw, some glue, a bit of sanding, and a bunch of inexpensive Harbor Freight pinch clamps and I had the perimeter pieces secured to the plates. The plates themselves measure 5.5" x 4.5". The standoffs would be about 2-3/4" so the whole thing (see below) stands about 3" high without the radar detector on top. Once the reinforcing strips were secure, I used a silver dollar as a guide and penciled in the corner radii. Some careful work on the belt sander and the corners were smoothed out.
After finishing the upper and lower plates, I laid my Autocom and all the other pieces into the lower plate by hand and, seeing to it that there was room in the rear corners, I marked them for the stand-offs. Up front, I wanted the stand-offs to serve as a support for the new Autocom Active-Plus unit, locking it in between the right standoff and the "lip" created by the reinforcing wood strips on the upper and lower plates. I marked the location of the forward standoffs. Holes were drilled in the center of each marking and then the upper and lower outside surfaces of the plates were countersunk so the stand-off screws would be flush.
The Autocom unit would be the tallest item inside the "box" so I added 1/8? to its height to make up for the small strip of Velcro that the unit would rest on. Then I cut my standoffs a little longer than that, finishing them down to the correct height on the sanding wheel of the belt sander. I marked the center of each end and drilled them undersize so the wood screws would bite.
Before assembly, I sanded everything, blew it off with the air hose, then brushed on some MinWax stain. In this case, I used a Blonde Oak, which is pretty light and really doesn't highlight the grain as much as I'd like. I'll probably build another one of these in the future and I?ve got some old Cherry Wood stain that does a much better job. In any case, I let the stain penetrate for about 90 seconds, wiped it off with cheesecloth, then let it dry. Once that was done, I sprayed all the pieces with MinWax Satin Finish Polyurethane sealer. Two coats did the trick. I realize that some of these products are no longer available per EPA regs, so use the currently available versions.
While the wood was drying from its staining and sealing, I tackled the electronics. I like the Centech Fuse Box, but small as it is, it's still too big for the space I had, so I built a homemade fused buss from a 5-fuse block available from my local Pep Boys.
Basically what you're looking at is two things. A fused power buss on the right and a grounding block on the left. Both are mounted to a delrin plate for compactness and ease of handling. I'll describe each individually.
The fused power buss starts out as a 5-fuse connection block from Pep Boys. Each side has half a set of fuse clips that are held in place by a thin fiberglass rod that runs the length of the block underneath. Pushing out either of these fiberglass rods will allow the clips on that side to fall out the top of the block. So that's what I did to one side of the clips.
Next I turned it belly-up and chucked it up in a table-top hobby mill that I have. A few passes with an end mill and I'd created a trough large enough to get the head of a soldering iron down in there. You could do something similar with a Dremel tool, although the cleanup might be a bit tougher.
Now I replaced the fuse clips on that side and instead of re-inserting the fiberglass rod, I replaced it with a piece of stripped Romex electrical wire. I went back into the trough I'd created and was able to get the soldering iron in there deep enough to solder the Romex wire to each of the fuse clips, transforming one side of the fuse block from individual contacts into a single, solid buss. I made sure to leave a few inches of Romex sticking out one side so I could solder a male spade connector onto it. Power now comes into the one side of the fused buss and goes out the other side wherever I've inserted a fuse to complete the connection. I used 2-amp fuses BTW.
The grounding block comes from Radio Shack. Actually, it's simply a connector block and it comes as a strip of 5. For my purposes, I cut two off the end and used those because they had nice little mounting holes that let me bolt the block onto the delrin base.
Each set of screws is a connection. But Radio Shack also sells a strip of forked plates to connect the connectors to each other. Cut two of them off the strip as I did, slide them under adjacent screws on one side, and suddenly all four screws are on the same circuit. Connect the power ground to any one of these screws and the whole thing becomes a grounding block.
Since I'm also running a V-1 and an XM Radio, and since both of these are bike powered, I needed one isolated lead for each of them. Autocom's isolated leads (part #1314) work great, but they have long wires on them, often necessary to reach from where the Autocom is located on peoples' bikes to where each accessory is. I didn't need wires this long so I shortened the wires to mere inches. One of these I shortened at the printed-circuit board (it's only 3 wires, as you can see). The other I shortened by cutting off the lengths I didn't want and soldering new 3.5mil stereo male plugs on the ends of the wires. Neither way is particularly easy, especially if you have thick hands/fingers, as the wires are small and not easy to handle. Even with a special ultra-narrow needle tip on my soldering iron. I needed another trip to Harbor Freight for one of their swivel fluorescent lights with the large magnifying glass (any excuse to buy tools, right?!!) in order to finish the job. It doesn't help that at my age, my close-up vision is starting to blur a bit, too.
Here?s my Autocom. As you can see, I've installed the hardwire kit and already shortened the wires and installed the connectors necessary to hook up to the fused power buss and the grounding block.
Partially assembled. Here's the Autocom in place along with the power buss. Both are attached at the bottom with Velcro. Behind the Autocom unit you can see the first of the isolators in place. The bottom isolator is attached to the base plate with Velcro and to the Autocom with double-sided tape. The second isolator will be positioned above the first one and attached the same way. . .Velcro on the bottom and tape up against the Autocom.
To power the XM, you need to keep the cigarette plug because the XM radio is a 6V unit and the plug contains an internal 12V-6V reducer. That's fine, but what I needed was space, and I didn't want to plug it into a female cigarette socket, then take my power leads off of that. So I took the male plug apart, unsoldered all the contact stuff that sticks out the nose end, and soldered in a set of pos/neg leads. I put the appropriate connectors on these leads.
Next, I installed the cigarette plug onto the underside of the upper lid, using 3M Dual-Lok. The trick was in getting the wires connected to the power buss, THEN putting the lid on the box. The cigarette plug itself weighs very little, so having it "hang" from above is not going to be a problem. Besides, the gap between it and the isolators is so small that it isn't enough for it to come off.
Here is the box with all its internals in place and a jumble of wires coming out the back. The wires with the 4-pronged gold-plated plug is the lead to the power buss. These are called Dean's Plugs (available from most hobby stores). They resist rusting and corrosion and they have excellent friction tension so they don't come apart easily. I wired the positive to two of the prongs and the neg to the other two. I put the matching female plug on the end of the Powerlet Tank Bag Power Kit that I used to deliver juice to the bag. The other wires are the power lead to the XM, the isolated lead to the XM, and the isolated lead to the radar detector. The cylindrical block is the power splitter for the V-1.
Here I've installed the V-1, the remote audio adapter and the power splitter. There's a V-1 remote visual which will mount atop the tankbag in a later photo. Yes, having the V-1 inside the tankbag virtually eliminates any Laser protection. Laser protection is pretty much a fallacy. If you get a Laser warning, pull over. You're it. Other than that, I've found no difference with the V-1. It tells me the direction and quantity of the radar sources, just like it did back when I had it up on my RCU shelf. No reduction in range (that I can discern) either.
To install the Powerlet PTB-006 Tank Bag Electrification Kit, you need to cut a hole in the tank bag. In my case, I found it easier and cleaner to simply burn a hole in it. For this I went to Home Depot and bought a coupler for 5/8" copper water pipe (about 85-cents). This coupler happens to be the identical diameter as the inside ring of the PTB-006. The one on the left is stock. The one on the right has been run up against a grinder wheel in order to chamfer a sharp edge onto one end.
Having marked the bag with where I wanted the main hole, and cautious that neither it nor the four mounting holes on the circumference would cut through a seam or stitching, I crammed a 2x4 into the tankbag, with one end positioned precisely behind where the hole was to be.
Then I got the ol' Benzomatic torch out and, gripping the sharpened pipe coupler with a pair of long pliers, I brought it up to a nice, glowing red. I then proceeded to burn through the tank bag and all of its layers of Cordura and sidewall stiffeners, in about 1/2-second. I pushed the hot coupler through the material quickly. I felt it bottom out against the 2x4 on the inside of the bag, and I removed it. Do it too slowly and you'll get flame, I guarantee it (DAMHIK). I prefer this way of making holes because they come out rounder than trying to burn them with a soldering iron. And because you don't ruin a good soldering iron tip in the process. The smaller hole on the lower left of the picture was made using a "bushing" also found in the Home Depot copper pipe section. That hole will be used to route the power wire and the isolated lead out and up to the XM radio, as well as lead to the V-1's remote visual display. On my bike, I've retained the option of broadcasting bike-to-bike using either VOX or PTT. However, since the PTT switch has to be hard-mounted on my bike, the lead to that switch has a plug on it. That's the yellow plug you'll see in one of the photos below.
Autocom's interface lead for the Kenwood FRS/GMRS radio is coiled and too long for my purposes. So I took it and cut off the coils, repositioning the plug to this much shorter length.
Once I got the wiring at the front of the bag tidied up, here's how it looks. The metal plate at the top came from Home Depot. I think it's some sort of multi-purpose carpentry joint plate. I put two 90-degree bends in it. I added a flat aluminum plate under the map case in order to give it some extra rigidity. Then I drilled and pop-riveted the bracket in place from underneath, making sure to go through the added aluminum plate.
Atop the metal bracket is one of Hoon Hardware's Roady Holders for my XM Radio. I got the one with no offset so that it centers up perfectly. This one is tricky because Hoon Hardware became Legal Speeding and I'm not sure if they're still around. You may have to make your own plate, but you can buy aluminum sheet at Home Depot. On the underside of the bracket, I located the V-1's remote visual using 3M Dual-Lok.
To secure the assembly inside the tankbag, I used some Velcro on the bottom of the lower box plate. Here, you can see how the shortened lead to the FRS radio helps keep things clean and uncluttered. You can also see how much space is left over. I carry my 70-oz CamelBak in this space along with sliding a spare shield (in its protective MotoEquip covering) along the rear perimeter of the bag. To help support the weight of the bladder, I've added the aluminum platen to the Big Mak tankbag base.
From the side, the FRS radio is clearly visible. It clips OVER the zipper.
Even with all this in place, I can see my instrumentation clearly. And I still have a great view of my XM Radio and the V-1's remote visual display.
Well, that pretty much sums up the steps I used in the building of this tankbag-mounted electronics system. This system is relatively neat and tidy. My total expenditure, apart from 15 hours of my labor, was about $50 for the wood, stain, lacquer, PTB-006, and the parts I used to make the fused power buss. I hope the pictures are clear enough that if anyone wants to follow them, they can do it. If anyone has questions, feel free to ask below.
Unfortunately, the Big Mak tankbag I have is NLA, but the electronics are solid and the design still holds up, so most of this can be applied to other tankbags on the market. I'm still an Autocom fan (wireless sound quality just can't compete), and I can't seem to break it no matter what. I've had the same Autocom unit for close to 8 years, and bought two used units as backups. Probably wasted my money. So, here goes. Captions are ABOVE the related photo.
----------
My first stop was at the hobby store for some wood. A small 6" x 12" piece of 3/32 birch plywood and some 3/8? square dowel strips and some 3/8x1/2 rectangular strips (pine, I believe). The narrower strips would be glued on as a reinforcing perimeter and the bigger strips would be cut to make the stand-off posts. Total investment so far, about $8.
Some time spent with a jigsaw, some glue, a bit of sanding, and a bunch of inexpensive Harbor Freight pinch clamps and I had the perimeter pieces secured to the plates. The plates themselves measure 5.5" x 4.5". The standoffs would be about 2-3/4" so the whole thing (see below) stands about 3" high without the radar detector on top. Once the reinforcing strips were secure, I used a silver dollar as a guide and penciled in the corner radii. Some careful work on the belt sander and the corners were smoothed out.
After finishing the upper and lower plates, I laid my Autocom and all the other pieces into the lower plate by hand and, seeing to it that there was room in the rear corners, I marked them for the stand-offs. Up front, I wanted the stand-offs to serve as a support for the new Autocom Active-Plus unit, locking it in between the right standoff and the "lip" created by the reinforcing wood strips on the upper and lower plates. I marked the location of the forward standoffs. Holes were drilled in the center of each marking and then the upper and lower outside surfaces of the plates were countersunk so the stand-off screws would be flush.
The Autocom unit would be the tallest item inside the "box" so I added 1/8? to its height to make up for the small strip of Velcro that the unit would rest on. Then I cut my standoffs a little longer than that, finishing them down to the correct height on the sanding wheel of the belt sander. I marked the center of each end and drilled them undersize so the wood screws would bite.
Before assembly, I sanded everything, blew it off with the air hose, then brushed on some MinWax stain. In this case, I used a Blonde Oak, which is pretty light and really doesn't highlight the grain as much as I'd like. I'll probably build another one of these in the future and I?ve got some old Cherry Wood stain that does a much better job. In any case, I let the stain penetrate for about 90 seconds, wiped it off with cheesecloth, then let it dry. Once that was done, I sprayed all the pieces with MinWax Satin Finish Polyurethane sealer. Two coats did the trick. I realize that some of these products are no longer available per EPA regs, so use the currently available versions.
While the wood was drying from its staining and sealing, I tackled the electronics. I like the Centech Fuse Box, but small as it is, it's still too big for the space I had, so I built a homemade fused buss from a 5-fuse block available from my local Pep Boys.
Basically what you're looking at is two things. A fused power buss on the right and a grounding block on the left. Both are mounted to a delrin plate for compactness and ease of handling. I'll describe each individually.
The fused power buss starts out as a 5-fuse connection block from Pep Boys. Each side has half a set of fuse clips that are held in place by a thin fiberglass rod that runs the length of the block underneath. Pushing out either of these fiberglass rods will allow the clips on that side to fall out the top of the block. So that's what I did to one side of the clips.
Next I turned it belly-up and chucked it up in a table-top hobby mill that I have. A few passes with an end mill and I'd created a trough large enough to get the head of a soldering iron down in there. You could do something similar with a Dremel tool, although the cleanup might be a bit tougher.
Now I replaced the fuse clips on that side and instead of re-inserting the fiberglass rod, I replaced it with a piece of stripped Romex electrical wire. I went back into the trough I'd created and was able to get the soldering iron in there deep enough to solder the Romex wire to each of the fuse clips, transforming one side of the fuse block from individual contacts into a single, solid buss. I made sure to leave a few inches of Romex sticking out one side so I could solder a male spade connector onto it. Power now comes into the one side of the fused buss and goes out the other side wherever I've inserted a fuse to complete the connection. I used 2-amp fuses BTW.
The grounding block comes from Radio Shack. Actually, it's simply a connector block and it comes as a strip of 5. For my purposes, I cut two off the end and used those because they had nice little mounting holes that let me bolt the block onto the delrin base.
Each set of screws is a connection. But Radio Shack also sells a strip of forked plates to connect the connectors to each other. Cut two of them off the strip as I did, slide them under adjacent screws on one side, and suddenly all four screws are on the same circuit. Connect the power ground to any one of these screws and the whole thing becomes a grounding block.
Since I'm also running a V-1 and an XM Radio, and since both of these are bike powered, I needed one isolated lead for each of them. Autocom's isolated leads (part #1314) work great, but they have long wires on them, often necessary to reach from where the Autocom is located on peoples' bikes to where each accessory is. I didn't need wires this long so I shortened the wires to mere inches. One of these I shortened at the printed-circuit board (it's only 3 wires, as you can see). The other I shortened by cutting off the lengths I didn't want and soldering new 3.5mil stereo male plugs on the ends of the wires. Neither way is particularly easy, especially if you have thick hands/fingers, as the wires are small and not easy to handle. Even with a special ultra-narrow needle tip on my soldering iron. I needed another trip to Harbor Freight for one of their swivel fluorescent lights with the large magnifying glass (any excuse to buy tools, right?!!) in order to finish the job. It doesn't help that at my age, my close-up vision is starting to blur a bit, too.
Here?s my Autocom. As you can see, I've installed the hardwire kit and already shortened the wires and installed the connectors necessary to hook up to the fused power buss and the grounding block.
Partially assembled. Here's the Autocom in place along with the power buss. Both are attached at the bottom with Velcro. Behind the Autocom unit you can see the first of the isolators in place. The bottom isolator is attached to the base plate with Velcro and to the Autocom with double-sided tape. The second isolator will be positioned above the first one and attached the same way. . .Velcro on the bottom and tape up against the Autocom.
To power the XM, you need to keep the cigarette plug because the XM radio is a 6V unit and the plug contains an internal 12V-6V reducer. That's fine, but what I needed was space, and I didn't want to plug it into a female cigarette socket, then take my power leads off of that. So I took the male plug apart, unsoldered all the contact stuff that sticks out the nose end, and soldered in a set of pos/neg leads. I put the appropriate connectors on these leads.
Next, I installed the cigarette plug onto the underside of the upper lid, using 3M Dual-Lok. The trick was in getting the wires connected to the power buss, THEN putting the lid on the box. The cigarette plug itself weighs very little, so having it "hang" from above is not going to be a problem. Besides, the gap between it and the isolators is so small that it isn't enough for it to come off.
Here is the box with all its internals in place and a jumble of wires coming out the back. The wires with the 4-pronged gold-plated plug is the lead to the power buss. These are called Dean's Plugs (available from most hobby stores). They resist rusting and corrosion and they have excellent friction tension so they don't come apart easily. I wired the positive to two of the prongs and the neg to the other two. I put the matching female plug on the end of the Powerlet Tank Bag Power Kit that I used to deliver juice to the bag. The other wires are the power lead to the XM, the isolated lead to the XM, and the isolated lead to the radar detector. The cylindrical block is the power splitter for the V-1.
Here I've installed the V-1, the remote audio adapter and the power splitter. There's a V-1 remote visual which will mount atop the tankbag in a later photo. Yes, having the V-1 inside the tankbag virtually eliminates any Laser protection. Laser protection is pretty much a fallacy. If you get a Laser warning, pull over. You're it. Other than that, I've found no difference with the V-1. It tells me the direction and quantity of the radar sources, just like it did back when I had it up on my RCU shelf. No reduction in range (that I can discern) either.
To install the Powerlet PTB-006 Tank Bag Electrification Kit, you need to cut a hole in the tank bag. In my case, I found it easier and cleaner to simply burn a hole in it. For this I went to Home Depot and bought a coupler for 5/8" copper water pipe (about 85-cents). This coupler happens to be the identical diameter as the inside ring of the PTB-006. The one on the left is stock. The one on the right has been run up against a grinder wheel in order to chamfer a sharp edge onto one end.
Having marked the bag with where I wanted the main hole, and cautious that neither it nor the four mounting holes on the circumference would cut through a seam or stitching, I crammed a 2x4 into the tankbag, with one end positioned precisely behind where the hole was to be.
Then I got the ol' Benzomatic torch out and, gripping the sharpened pipe coupler with a pair of long pliers, I brought it up to a nice, glowing red. I then proceeded to burn through the tank bag and all of its layers of Cordura and sidewall stiffeners, in about 1/2-second. I pushed the hot coupler through the material quickly. I felt it bottom out against the 2x4 on the inside of the bag, and I removed it. Do it too slowly and you'll get flame, I guarantee it (DAMHIK). I prefer this way of making holes because they come out rounder than trying to burn them with a soldering iron. And because you don't ruin a good soldering iron tip in the process. The smaller hole on the lower left of the picture was made using a "bushing" also found in the Home Depot copper pipe section. That hole will be used to route the power wire and the isolated lead out and up to the XM radio, as well as lead to the V-1's remote visual display. On my bike, I've retained the option of broadcasting bike-to-bike using either VOX or PTT. However, since the PTT switch has to be hard-mounted on my bike, the lead to that switch has a plug on it. That's the yellow plug you'll see in one of the photos below.
Autocom's interface lead for the Kenwood FRS/GMRS radio is coiled and too long for my purposes. So I took it and cut off the coils, repositioning the plug to this much shorter length.
Once I got the wiring at the front of the bag tidied up, here's how it looks. The metal plate at the top came from Home Depot. I think it's some sort of multi-purpose carpentry joint plate. I put two 90-degree bends in it. I added a flat aluminum plate under the map case in order to give it some extra rigidity. Then I drilled and pop-riveted the bracket in place from underneath, making sure to go through the added aluminum plate.
Atop the metal bracket is one of Hoon Hardware's Roady Holders for my XM Radio. I got the one with no offset so that it centers up perfectly. This one is tricky because Hoon Hardware became Legal Speeding and I'm not sure if they're still around. You may have to make your own plate, but you can buy aluminum sheet at Home Depot. On the underside of the bracket, I located the V-1's remote visual using 3M Dual-Lok.
To secure the assembly inside the tankbag, I used some Velcro on the bottom of the lower box plate. Here, you can see how the shortened lead to the FRS radio helps keep things clean and uncluttered. You can also see how much space is left over. I carry my 70-oz CamelBak in this space along with sliding a spare shield (in its protective MotoEquip covering) along the rear perimeter of the bag. To help support the weight of the bladder, I've added the aluminum platen to the Big Mak tankbag base.
From the side, the FRS radio is clearly visible. It clips OVER the zipper.
Even with all this in place, I can see my instrumentation clearly. And I still have a great view of my XM Radio and the V-1's remote visual display.
Well, that pretty much sums up the steps I used in the building of this tankbag-mounted electronics system. This system is relatively neat and tidy. My total expenditure, apart from 15 hours of my labor, was about $50 for the wood, stain, lacquer, PTB-006, and the parts I used to make the fused power buss. I hope the pictures are clear enough that if anyone wants to follow them, they can do it. If anyone has questions, feel free to ask below.
Last edited:
With this as a help to me, I did my own on my Wolfman Explorer lite tank bag. My Passport 8500 X50 radar detector in the top of it works nice.
