I got 16" apes on the way and I know I'm going to have to extend the electrical wires, but how much longer do they need to be???

Thanks!

If I recall, I went 20" over with 18 gauge wire & ran it through the bars. You'll have a bunch left over to trim off in the headlight bucket, but having extra wire to play with is WAY better than being a hair too short and have to rerun it or extend it again.

Make sure you stagger your splices when you solder so you don't have one big lumpy area you're trying to feed/fish through the bars.

Hope that helps--

RK

If you got 16" apes, then you need to extend your wires 16"... easy as that...

Oh, and dont forget to stagger all of your splices... it makes it easier to run your wires... dont use butt connectors, solder all your connections and use heat shrink tubing...

well, just adding 16" worth of wire made sense to me, but I DON'T want to have to do this again so figured I'd just make sure!ha ha Thanks for the help!

for what its worth....
are you wiring internally? i went 16in apes on my 99 roadie and didnt have to extend at all, just pulled the miles of wire out of the headlight and there was plenty

so if you want to go external just pull out what you need

yeah, I was wanting to do the internal wiring...we'll see how it goes once everything gets here and I'm ready to start taking it all down... Thanks!

coachk wrote:
I got 16" apes on the way and I know I'm going to have to extend the electrical wires, but how much longer do they need to be???

Thanks!

I've done lots of apes with internal wiring, I have always use 60% of the bars rise as the length for control wire extensions, i.e. 60% of 18" apes = 10.8 so I would cut wire extensions at 11" except the two clutch switch wires which need to be about 4" longer to allow these wire to go into the switch housing and then back out to the clutch switch connector.

This works for cables and brake lines as well, for 18" apes I would order all cables and brake line at stock length plus 11".

I would use 9" as the number for 16" apes.

As mentioned before, stagger solder splices and it really helps to cover the entire wire bundle with heat shrink and coat with a little grease prior to running them through the bars. It also looks really good if you drill 2 - 3/8" holes through the top clamp just where the wires exit the bars, one on each side of the center brace you will see under the top clamp.

Jim