October 18th, 2009 | Filed under: Motorcycles | RSS Feed
For the past two years I’ve been riding with a mediocre GPS set-up on my KTM and in preparation for a coming ride into Mexico I decided it was time to fix things. The changes I made were two-fold, the first was changing the mount location from being on the handlebars to being mounted on top of the dash, the second was to hard-wire the unit so it would be powered off the bike instead of its own battery. The relocation was needed to allow for better visibility over my tank bag as well as to put it in a more line-of-sight location while riding. The hard-wiring was needed as I was a slave to being able to recharge my GPS battery via a wall outlet on longer rides, that’s not good for extended off-road/back country riding. An added benefit of the relocation was that I could now mount my SPOT unit on my handlebars, nice. Off I went to my garage with a plan for the day, read on for the step by step details with photos.
The Before Photo
As a point of reference, here is a before photo:
Notice the Touratech GPS bracket is on top of the triple clamp. The plan is to move it so it’s on top of the dash and gauges instead.
Disassembly
The first order of business was to disassemble things a bit, namely to remove the crash bars on both sides, loosen/remove the upper fairing pieces and then to remove the windscreen and headlight unit. Doing all of that would give me access to the back/under-side of the dash where I would attach part of the dash mount bracket as well as find the hard-wire lead I would use to power the GPS unit off the bike.
I got started by removing the right crash bar, doing that involved loosening a total of four bolts/nuts, easy. The first is to loosen the cross-brace support bar on the right side:
Then I loosened the battery case and lower mount points:
And finally I undid the rear mount screw/bolt:
With all of those undone the right side crash bar comes free:
The process for the left side crash bar is the same, except in this case I left the cross-brace support bar attached:
After removing the crash bars I could then remove the left and right side upper fairing pieces. Each side is held on by five simple allen bolts that when removed allow for easy removal of the fairings:
With the side fairings moved out of the way it’s six easy allen bolts to remove the windscreen, and after that the headlight assembly can be popped loose and disconnected from the bike:
Install the Dash Mount and Hard-Wire for Power
My first step here was to trace the existing power wire (for a different GPS unit, I’ve never used this power cable!) back to its source (an attachment point behind the dash to a fused/powered lead:
After that I prepared the new power lead, it has many options I’m not using as my only interest (for now) is powering the unit. So help protect those connections I neatly tucked them away:
Before attaching the new power lead I wanted to finish the actual mount itself and so back under the dash I went. The next step being to mount the lower dash bracket to the dash frame:
With that in place I first drilled pilot holes, then the larger final holes through which I could bolt on the upper portion of the dash bracket:
With the dash mount in place I could now attach the actual GPS bracket and position the GPS unit:
Next I ran the power cord down to the triple clamp area below the dash where it connected to the fuse box behind the dash:
I then simply reversed the disassembling process by remounting the headlight and windscreen, then the side fairings and finally the crash bars:
I put the GPS unit in its cradle and plugged in the power cord, then mounted up my SPOT unit and took the bike out for a test drive. Here’s what the new cockpit looks like:
I’d still like to tidy things up a bit in terms of the cabling running around but for now it works great. The GPS is up high and closer to my line-of-sight while riding, and I can still easily see all gauges, all while now gaining room for my SPOT unit on the handlebars. All told I spent a few hours getting this done, that included a break for coffee somewhere in the middle. It was time well spent… 
