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Z1300 External Battery Connections
Last Update 8/22/08
We've talked about it on the site so here it is in real life. Members have commented about the fact that the original style batteries in these bikes are marginal and you have to pull the airbox lid to get at the terminals so you can charge the battery. As a consequence, airbox lids are one of the most sought after items because they get left off for long periods of time and come up missing in action! I've been updating the Stator connections and soldering up a number of bad wiring connections on the bike I'm fixing up now, so I thought I'd take some pictures along the way. One of the 'must do' mod's on this bike in my eyes anyway is to wire in an external battery connection. When the bike is sitting up for long periods you really need to leave a battery charger / maintainer connected to keep the battery properly maintained. If you don't keep it maintained properly, after a few weeks it might be dead. Either way, it's going to get weak and the bike won't start.
We've all probably discovered by now that the KZ1300 models have a master electrical cutoff built into the main switch. When you open the seat and leave the switch in that position and you turn the ignition switch on nothing happens. Basically, all the power is dead because it all goes through the main switch first. This is a feature we should all take advantage of when we leave the bike sitting somewhere and we don't want it stolen easily. You can very easily take a slide hammer that auto body repairmen use for dent pulling and jerk the tumbler out of the ignition switch. Then you slip a screwdriver in the hole and turn it just like you're using the key in effect, crank it up and drive away. Assuming your bike actually starts up that easily, but that's another story! If you leave the main switch off when you park the bike, now they jerk the tumbler out and expect to start the bike but the electrical is still dead thanks to the main switch. They could get it started if they want to take the time to run some jumper wires and they know what they're doing, or they can at least unlock the steering that way so they can spirit it into the back of a truck and drive away. Still, the main switch is a good anti-theft feature.
When it comes to keeping the battery charged up, I always turn the main switch off if for no other reason than the fact that I don't have to worry about a short or something pulling power off my battery while it's sitting. On the ZN1300 Voyager models, they didn't have this main switch feature because the electronics pull power off the battery all the time even with the key off to keep the clock on the correct time, to maintain the trip computer memory, the radio station memory and a few other things. It's a small amount of power, but even though the battery is substantially larger on the ZN1300, if you don't keep the battery on a charger when it's sitting to maintain it, the battery will be completely drained in a week and you take a chance of permanently damaging the battery by leaving it drained.
Ergo, the need for external battery connections. There's two things this will do for you. Number one is that it will allow you to pull the side cover and easily attach your battery charger to the alligator clips hanging there without having to pull anything apart to get to the battery each time. Number two, and I'm sure we've all run into this one time or another, you take a ride somewhere and you run the battery down trying to get it started because it's flooded or vapor locked or you pick the problem. Now you've got to find some jumper cables, pull the airbox lid and so forth so you can get it charged back up.
Granted, a heavy set of jumper cables connected directly to the battery will pass a lot more amperage than these smaller wires I use and probably start the bike fairly easy, but what if you can't get your hands on a set of cables? With the external battery connections shown here, I've got 14 - 16 feet of wire I can string out and attach via alligator clips to a car battery, or another motorcycle, lawnmower... you name it. We can't exactly carry jumper cables with us and if it's just you and another bike, jumper cables might be impractical anyway because the ends are so large. These alligator clips may allow you to reach in on another bikes battery and connect to it, and hopefully, without pulling anything apart to get at their battery.
That's the plan at least and I can tell you from experience that these are a life saver. I've put them on every 1300 I've owned and I've had to use them many times. Even if you can't charge the battery enough to use the starter to crank the engine, you can bring the charge up enough to get the bike rolling and kick start it by popping it into gear. I can remember being glad I lived on a hill with one of these bikes because the compression was low on the engine and the bike just would not start in the winter except to roll down the hill and pop it into second gear. Once it was warmed up I could restart it easily enough later in the day, but I never even tried in the morning because it was a waste of battery power. So let's take a look -
One problem many have probably run into when working with the battery
connections is how to get the screw back into the nut below the terminal.
You can't use longer screws because they'll bottom out and push into the battery
when you're tightening the connection and tear up the battery, but when the nut
underneath falls down, the screw is too short to grab the threads so you can get
it started. An easy solution to the problem can be seen in these 2
pictures. I use a scrap piece of a plastic tie-wrap and fold it in half and jam it
under the nut. It will press the nut up tight against the terminal and
once I get the bolt started I just pull it out.
I solder terminal lugs at both ends, the battery end and at the alligator clips.
Then I bolt the lug down and solder it to the alligator clip to get the very
best connection I can. You can use smaller alligator clips but they'll
usually break easier, be harder to clip on a battery and not have as good of a
plastic cover over them either. The smaller ones usually have a crimp end
where the larger has a crimp and small screw for a lug to bolt to. I'm
using heavy zip cord here and the bigger clips will fit over the wire without
biting into it which could cause a short. Nothing wrong with slipping
something else in between the clip and the wire to keep from wearing through it
like a piece of rubber or plastic and let the jaws bite into that some instead
of taking a chance of biting into the wire.
Test fit them so you don't get too much wire bundled up inside and it ends up
putting pressure on your sidecover. You wouldn't want it to pop off while
you're riding. I'm using about 14 feet of wire bundled up here. If
you change to the Hawker battery, since it's about an inch thinner in width, you
can slip these wires in behind the battery instead of having them on the side.
The finished product except I still need to put a new battery cable on the
negative post. This one was too short to reach to where it was supposed to
hook up, but I'm sure you get the drift. If you're not familiar with the
orange wrapped around the bundle of wire that's a Velcro wire tie /
tie-wrap. These are very strong and they're real handy for holding things
in place or out of the way when you're working on your bike. You can get
them at an electrical supply house or possibly your local auto parts store.
david@kz1300.com
NOTE: On these newer browsers I've noticed that they don't always display my large images in full size when you open an image from the thumbnails. Once you click the thumbnail and open the larger image, if you 'mouse over' the image you should see a " + " symbol or some other indicator like a box with arrows usually on the bottom right edge of the image. If you click on the indicator, then the image will expand to it's full size which displays full screen on computers that use a 800 x 600 resolution setting for the monitor. If you click the indicator again it will go back to the smaller image. Some people use a resolution setting of 1024 x 768 or higher on their monitors and for those users the images will appear smaller than full screen in size. You can change your monitor settings easily enough if you desire. Also, the indicator I've noticed is slow to appear even after the image appears to of completely loaded. The indicator in Netscape seems to be a lot faster to display than the one in Internet Explorer.
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