Now that I've got this thing installed & functioning correctly, I figured I'd put up a post on it.
So up to this point, my dash consisted of a handful of led pilot lights and a cheap-o Harbor Freight tach with a bicycle speedo attached to the top tree; it worked (sorta) but was always meant to just be a temporary solution until I came up with something that I really liked.
Electrosport.com has been telling me since last August that they’d have Acewell’s 4000 series gauge available “within the next 30 days”; after nine months of having sunshine blown up my ass I said screw it and just ordered one from a distributor in Japan – had it in my hot little hands in less than a week:
Hooking it up was pretty easy; fortunately the wiring diagram is written in English and Japanese or it would have been a bit more challenging. The main harness coming from the gauge terminates in a handful of weatherproof connectors for the sub-harnesses; the whole mess will fit inside the headlight housing, but just barely.
The speedo is driven by a hall-effect sender which I mounted to the fork leg with a bracket fashioned from some scrap aluminum. The magnet-tipped bolt that Acewell includes wasn't going to work for me, so I ended up epoxying a rare earth magnet directly to the brake rotor:
One thing to note is that it is very important that the magnet passes by the sender at as close to 90 degrees as possible, or you'll get wonky speed readings.
I tapped into the yellow coil wire to pull a signal for the tach:
The 4000 has two temp functions; ambient & engine. I decided that I wasn’t terribly keen on the idea of drilling & tapping a hole through the sump to measure oil temp, so I made another bracket and attached it to one of the valve cover bolts to act as a quasi-cylinder head temp sender. It’s not as accurate as if it was reading directly from the sump, but I figured at worst, it’s more than I had before:
For now, I left the ambient temp sensor hanging out inside the headlight bucket.
I attached the gauge to a bracket that I made then bolted to the underside of the tree; this also let me fine tune the position of the gauge so it was easier to read – one thing about the Acewells is that the LCD screen becomes hard to read you’re looking at it from a funny angle.
The indicator LED’s are bright as hell, which is why they look all washed out in the picture; they’re actually very crisp in real life.
The gauge also includes a handlebar-mounted switch that will allow you to scroll through the different functions without removing your hand from the grips; I didn't have any room on my clipons (plus the switch is a little fugly) for the bracket so I ended leaving the switch in the box.
Unfortunately the operators manual was written completely in Japanese so it took me a few days of trial & error to get the gauge setup correctly (like inputting the wheel circumference and ignition pulses per revolution) and to figure out the various functions. Now that I’ve got it sorted though (and overcome the buyer's remorse) I'm really quite pleased with it.
