Honda R/R: 7-wire unit...

[Steve]

I switched to a relay controlled dirrect battery voltage (ignition relay mod) and that fixed it.

I did pretty much the same thing, except it was not an ignition relay mod, it was a terminal strip mod. Too many farkles on the bike, so I installed a terminal strip that is activated by a relay which is, in turn, activated by a key-switched wire (I don't remember which one ). Items powered by this terminal strip include the CB radio, XM radio, voltmeter backlight, LED driving lights, Blue LED show lights and the r/r sense wire. Since there is now a good sense wire connection, the voltmeter sits rock-solid at 14.3 after it settles in. I got this picture before it was all done, so there are more wires than this involved. The bottom two rows are dedicated to providing a good ground point for all these farkles.



What, you never heard of a "farkle"?
It's a term used in the long-distance bike crowd, mostly consisting of BMWs, Honda STs and Kawi Concours,
It is actually an acronym, and it goes like this:
F ancy
A ccessory,
R elatively
K ool, and
L ikely
E xpensive.

8-[

[Sandy]

Any issues with a slight drop in voltage to the tail light circuit?

I guess it depends on what a slight drop is. The way the Honda R/R with sense wire works is that it regulates the voltage by what it reads on the sense wire. In other words it will increase it's output until it reads around 14.7 volts on the sense wire. If you have a 1 volt drop on the brake light wire then the R/R will output 14.7 on that wire and that will end up charging your battery at 15.7. So the closer the sense wire connection is to the voltage you get to the voltage read at the battery terminal the better. The relay setup would do that but what I did was connect the sense wire to the back of the stock fuse block at one of the switched fuses. You could also be seeing a loss at your ignition switch, try cleaning that too.

[Dave8338]

All done.

R/R conversion is done and all checks out within specs: 12.36 static, 13.4 at idle and 15.43 at 5,000. I would prefer the 15.43 to be a little lower, however...it is within range, so I'll leave well enough alone.

The 8-wire conversion is easy, maybe a 2-3 on a scale of 1-10.
I used the tail light circuit as the sense circuit connection, easy to get at and right there in the harness.

Thanks for the help / info guys! \\/ 187 miles yesterday....:-D