Duke

Cast aluminum. 

In looking at the pictures of this failure, I wonder if simply epoxying an extra layer of material to the bottom of the pan would provide additional protection? A  piece of 1/4” steel would protect the drain plug, and would also add strength to the bottom of the pain to keep it from flexing if you were to bottom the bike on the pan. At a minimum, it would take a lot harder hit to crack the aluminum, because the crack would have to form on the stronger parts of the pan instead of the weaker flat bottom. I only wonder if the epoxy would hold. 

2 hours ago, estell said:

OK, there is one but it is a bit of a special case. The full story there is that he was off road. He was riding his FJ-09 onto a slab of granite that had a 4 inch "bump" on it. I find that on flat surfaces the oil pan with the fin cut off is not the lowest point. The center stand or muffler makes first contact on speed bumps.

Some of us have embarked upon a new farkle quest. Don’t be killing the buzz.

Only joking of course, but I’m certainly planning to Mazda my ride at the next oil change. Too many instances of cracked oil pans for my tastes. 

I would hate to have to move all (most) of my farkles to a new bike, so I'm sticking with what I have for now. If I make a change it'll be to a totally different bike (DR 650).

1 hour ago, foxtrot722 said:

Considering the $160 for the U-Haul trailer rent plus the parts, I agree the Higdonion would be the way to go. I was lucky the wives were not far away and their vehicle has a trailer hitch. If I was 200 miles from home and no one in the area, would have made this more difficult on several levels. Unless I see something better, probably look at getting the Higdonion. The only downside I see is I have forward mounted frame sliders mounted for the sole purpose of having somewhere to rest my legs and feet on a long ride, it really makes a difference. 

I hadn’t even considered the cost of a U-Haul. This is beginning to look like something that bears further investigation. 

Crud, I suppose I’m going to have to install my Mazda plug at the next oil change, but I really like the one I’m using because it has a built in magnet.

Maybe I’ll splurge and spend money now on a Higdonion to protect my pan rather than spending it later on a new pan. Then I could use my fancy drain plug. 

1 hour ago, ilanr1 said:

Please update about the heat level when you are acutely riding it.

 

Maybe @chitown will beat me to it. I have a feeling that he is going to be working hard to get the mods to his bike done quickly. 

I have feelers out to find an oscilloscope that I can use to get a clear picture of what the ECU is actually doing to regulate the heat level of the grips. I’m sure it’s pulse width modulation, but I want to see how long the duty cycle is for each of the levels to better understand how Yamaha has the ECU programmed. I have a feeling they are doing a very low duty cycle to go along with their low resistance grips. 

7 minutes ago, chitown said:

@Duke nice work and informative write up. 

One thing I'm not clear on is whether you are able to use the menu controls for low/med/high and get varying amounts of heat on the fly?  

The menus work exactly the same as they do for the OEM heated grips. You have a choice of low/med/high while riding, and you have the ability to customize each of these settings from a sub menu. I believe the sub menu is only available when the engine is not running, but I'm not 100% certain of that.

19 minutes ago, ilanr1 said:

Thanks man for sharing that.

I'm definitely think that i will do it ,  as right now i have the original ones , but as time goes the outside rubber is not very good.

And to spend again for another original set i don't think so...

As for the heating issue  , is it turns to be really hot or what ?.

Thanks

 

I need to get some riding time in before I can give a real world evaluation of the warmth of the grips. Unfortunately, I'm recovering from rotator cuff surgery right now, which is why I have time to work on my bike instead of riding it.

I can say that my initial testing seemed to show that the grips should be more than warm enough for my needs.

There's not a lot to see, but here goes.

This is the overall...please excuse the messy garage.

Here is the left side from the back. Still not much to see.

And the left side from underneath where you can see the cable for the heated grips following the same path as the factory heated grips.

Here is the right side, where you can see the cable running along side the throttle cables with some extra slack to allow the throttle to turn without putting the wires in a bind or stretch situation.

And here is a shot from the front showing that more clearly.

Like I said, not much to see, but at least it shows that this can be done in a relatively clean fashion. It's certainly nice to not have to wire in a separate switch or controller to control the grips.

Really there isn't anything special about this install other than getting the grips wired correctly. Everything else is about as easy as changing grips, other than the left grip being a little extra tight with the layer of heat shrink on there and I guess routing the wires, but neither of those are really that hard to do.

Duke

16 minutes ago, nicksta43 said:

I've got Oxford heated grips. I'm not sure how they are wired or controlled but they do work very well. I'd love to be able to control them from the bike.

I think it's worth it to do some investigating...

Start by measuring their resistance. That will help you determine if they are capable of being integrated. 

Also, if you do some research on advrider in the Super Tenere BIG thread, I believe people have integrated the Oxfords. I have to believe that the ECU and factory grips for both bikes are very similar. 

10 minutes ago, betoney said:

What were these "quality and reliability problems" with the factory heated grips? 

I read several posts where the grips had failed after too short of a time period after install. I also feel that the design is overly complex, and I like the stick on elements because I am free to run whatever grips I want. 

So, here is my very simple wiring diagram for the final product. The wire colors are representative of the grip heating elements (red, white, and blue), the positive from the bike (Yellow/Blue), and the ground from the bike (black). As you can see, you connect the white wires from both heating elements to the yellow/blue wire from the bike, and then you connect the red and blue wires from both heating elements to the ground from the bike.

Ok, I'm not going to bore you with pictures, and instead I'm just going to explain why I have things connected the way they are, describe how I have everything connected, and provide you with a crude wiring diagram so you can follow along.

First, the disclaimer. I am not advocating that anyone do this with their bike. I am only describing what I've done with my bike. I have no understanding of anyone else’s abilities, so proceed at your own risk.

I am hoping that others will join in the discussion to further everyone's understanding of Yamaha's OEM grip heater technology. Actually, calling it technology is a gross overstatement. The only thing technical is the fact that the pulse width modulation (PWM) is being provided by some kind of microcontroller (presumably the ECU) which is controlled by the menus on the dash. Other than that, the rest of this just requires a basic understanding of Ohm's Law and how PWM can adjust the heat output of the heating elements.

All this having been said, please do not dump all over this thread. Instead, please ask constructive questions and provide constructive feedback. I am NOT an expert in all things Yamaha or in all things technical/electrical/electronic; however, I do have a professional background in electronics from which I drew my conclusions. With each of us bringing our own knowledge, experience, and general common sense to the forum, let's make the best use of all three and see if we can collectively come up with a properly working, safe solution that any of us can use.

Now for the meat of this post.

As you saw in an earlier post, I used the Heat Demon brand of grip heating elements. I’ve found their product to have reasonable quality control and reliability. The only thing you will use from the kit are the elements themselves and the heat shrink for the left grip. Everything else is not needed since you will control the heat output from the OEM menus.

I won’t bore you with how to install the heating elements. That has been covered in exhaustive detail in countless places on the Internet. Just know that you need to route the wires for both elements to the right side of the bike where the two factory heated grip connectors are located. It is up to you if you want to cut off the factory connectors and wire direct, or if you want to buy some of the correct connectors (the same ones as used for our blinker connections) to connect to the heating elements and then plug into the factory connectors. This is what I did, and it works great.

Once you have the grips installed and the wires routed, your next step is to make the correct connections. This is where this thread could go entirely off the rails, so please read carefully and bear with me.

If you look at the wiring diagram for the bike, you will find that the factory heated grips are connected in series. This fact created a challenge for me due to the large quantity of conflicting information on the Internet regarding the resistance of the factory grips. I’ve found information stating everything from 1.5 to 2.5 Ohms per grip with some degree of accuracy, so I chose to use 1.5 Ohms for my purposes. This means that the factory configuration results in the computer seeing a total resistance of 3 Ohms.

Another challenge is that the Heat Demon grips are designed to be used with a rocker switch to control the heat output, and that switch only provides off, low, and high as options. Because of this the heating elements have three wires, which can cause additional confusion. How do you connect grips with three wires into what is a two-wire system on the bike?

The answer to this question comes from Ohm’s Law. The heating elements are nothing but resistors. The three wires exist only because the elements actually consist of two separate resistors to accommodate the low and high settings. You can choose to connect the wires in a variety of configurations, but by using one wire as the input and combining two wires on the output, you wind up with the two resistors in one grip connected in parallel, which results in a resistance of 4.8 Ohms per grip. If you only connect one wire on the input and one wire on the output, the resistance is higher (thanks to Ohm’s Law), and this configuration will not work for our purposes. In fact, 4.8 Ohms is a compromise, but so far it seems to be a workable compromise for me. Only time and further testing will prove if this compromise functions as needed.

Now, if we connect the two grips in series the way the factory grips are connected, we will wind up with 9.6 Ohms of total resistance. This is more than three times the total resistance of the factory grips connected in series, which results in less than one third of the heat of the factory grips. This is the first configuration I tried because I was simply following in the footsteps of Yamaha. Even though the ECU recognized the elements as heated grips and provided me full access to all the associated menu options, this configuration was a failure. I could barely feel that the grips were heating when running at full blast on a 70-degree day. Back to the drawing board.

Next, I started thinking about ways that I could increase the heat output of the heating elements. According to Ohm’s Law, this means that I must change one of three variables, which are voltage, current, or resistance. I had already cranked the settings in the menu to their max, so there was nothing more I could do to increase voltage. With voltage fixed, the only way to increase current is to reduce resistance. But how do you reduce the resistance of a fixed resistor?

Back to Ohm’s Law. I had two identical resistors in the form of two 4.8 Ohm heating elements. What if I connected them in parallel instead of in series? The resulting total resistance would be 2.4 Ohms, which is 20% less resistance than the factory grips when connected in series. Would the ECU accept this resistance and allow me to access the heated grip menus? Would this result in my ECU going super nova and destroying the earth as we know it? The simple answers are YES and NO!

By connecting the two elements within each grip heating element in parallel, and them connecting the two grip heating elements in parallel with each other as well, I arrived at a resistance that was low enough to allow the ECU to offer the heated grip options and to actually drive the heated grips at an acceptable level.

FYI...with the grips connected in parallel, you do not have to worry that your bike will go up in flames should one grip fail. What will happen is that total resistance of the circuit will double due to the loss of the parallel leg, which will result in the total current flow actually decreasing instead of increasing. Basically, one grip will be cold and the other will be lukewarm at best. The good news is that this should actually make troubleshooting which grip has failed just a little easier.

Early on in this post I mentioned PWM, but I haven’t mentioned it at all during the post. Well, that’s because it’s not directly relevant to the problem at hand, but it is an interesting subject that you might do well to research to understand how the bike controls the heat of the grips.

I’ve also mentioned Ohm’s Law several times in the post. I won’t even try to explain the concept, because like so many thing other things you can find it well explained on the Internet, including explanations of series and parallel resistance.

Thanks for reading, and please feel free to offer perspectives and feedback or to ask questions. If I don’t have an answer, I suspect someone else will offer one up.

I'll try to attach my wiring diagram to the next post.

Duke

1 hour ago, Tracerracer said:

the ECU senses the resistance of the heated grips when they are in "series wired in", _parallel_ does not work, thats all iirc.

The computer doesn’t actually care if the grips are in series or parallel. All it sees is total resistance. 

If it senses too little resistance (short) or too much resistance (open), the menu option will not appear. I don’t know exactly how much resistance it expects, but I do know two values that allowed the menu option to appear. 

These are the elements I’m using:

Heat Demon External Grip Warmer Kit for Motorcycle (210019RR) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001AWRCJO/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_gXeVCbP19XYSS

There are others, but I’ve had good luck with this brand.

I’ll post more details later in the week.

I didn’t take any pictures of the actual grip heater element installation, but there’s nothing special about that. The important part is getting the wires connected correctly so the ECU senses resistance, which enables the grip options in the menus.

I tried several different combinations of connections, and spent quite a bit of time trying to understand how the ECU was controlling the current flow through the grips, before coming up with a workable combination.

I’ll draw up a wiring diagram and take a few pictures of the actual connections I made on my bike, but it’ll be a few days before I can get it done.

I just finished installing mine today. I haven’t had a chance to use them on the road yet, but they heat nicely in the garage.

I just couldn’t see spending so much on factory grips that seem to have quality and reliability problems.

If a how-to post would be helpful, I can do one. If it’s already been done, I won’t bother.