Tank bag electrical outlet

[Justin726]

So a lot of times I've been wanting some way to charge my cell phone while on the bike. I found a place to buy everything I needed for that. The company is called Powerlet if you want to check it out, but I was thinking that their product was a little overpriced and that I could do it myself for a bit cheaper. Here's what I did.

Here's pretty much everything I used for the install. I had a spare flat connector (long black cord) that I ran from my fuse block up to near the steering head of the bike. The round plug, and the 2 sets of wires with flat connectors are all RV components. The round plug I found online, and the 2 wire sets I found at my local RV dealer. The car charger outlets I got from NAPA.

[Justin726]

Most of the work to be done was going to be to the round RV outlet. That was going to be installed on the side of the bag. I was planning on installing it "as is" but when I got to looking for a good place to mount it, it seemed like most places wouldn't accomidate the entire round part of the outlet and still keep the outlet close to the power cord on the bike.




I ended up figuring that the best place to mount the outlet was on the side pocket of my tank bag, but the spot I wanted to mount it on meant that I would have to trim down the outlet to make it much more narrow. So I got some scissors and a razor blade out and went to work. Once I got the outlet trimmed down, I found a scrap piece of hard plastic that I had laying around the garage and trimmed that down to match the shape of the outlet. This piece of plastic would get put on the inside of the pocket and act as a backing plate to the RV connector.



I drilled mounting holes in the connector and backing plate, and found some short hardware to connect them together. Here is what they looked like together before they got seperated and mounted on the bag.

[Justin726]

I borrowed some small sewing scissors from my wife to cut a round hole in the pocket of the tankbag to slide the wires and main body of the connector through. I slid the connector through the hole and then on the inside of the pocket I slid the backing plate over the wires and main body of the connector until it was up against the inside of the tankbag. I punched a couple holes throught the outer connector hole, tank bag, and inner backing plate hole. I slid the screws throught the holes to squeese the tank bag material between the connector and backing plate and tightened everything up.



On the inside of the pocket I cut the wires of the connector pretty short. I cut one of the 2 wire connectors. One end I attached to the wires coming from the connector and the other end I spliced into one of the female car charger outlets (from the first pic). So now I have a car charger outlet inside the side pocket of my tank bag that I can put in and take out as I need. The 2 wire connectors simply slide together and apart fairly easily. ---Sorry, no pic---

The last thing to do is to connect the new tank bag outlet to the power outlet on the bike. This is done with the other 2 wire connector. That way, when refuleing the bike or taking the bag off the bike at the end of the day, simply uplug one or both ends of the 2 wire connectors and you're good to go.

[zzr6oo187]

not to shabby, i just put a 12 volt lighter adapter under my passenger seat and screwed it in,used it for my radar detecter. then i went on a nice lil trip and my blue tooth died so i bought a charger and just throw it under my seat now.

[zzkenoman]

I have the same tankbag and you really did a great job, I laid my wires thru the zipper which was an eye sore if you caught it.