My wife’s car has almost every conceivable button and doodad available in the market today, and after playing wheel man on one of the few occasions she lets me drive it, I am left with a reminder of how deprived of creature comforts I am in my convertible. Poor me.
Because it is doubtful I am going to replace my long‐suffering automobile this month (or next, for that matter), and yet wanting to improve my access to life’s little rewards when on the road, I decided to install a garage door opener on the Yamaha.
I had the opener that was in my wife’s previous car — made unnecessary by the factory‐installed opener in the Cadillac — so the first criteria of the job was satisfied: it had to be cheap, and an opener that had long since depreciated in value to, well, nothing, was definitely cheap. I had also previously installed a momentary switch in the left control housing on the Yamaha to serve as a PTT button for the communication system, and it had been made unnecessary when the Motorola radio was replaced with a Sena. Appearances being important, the momentary switch would be used to activate the opener, allowing me to conceal the opener in an accessible location.
After disassembling the opener, I soldered two leads to the back of the circuit board, one to each side of the OEM switch; those leads would later attach to the leads issuing from the momentary switch in the handlebar housing. I also removed the mechanical bits of the original switch, largely because I was curious about their composition and design. I drilled a hole into the housing through which to feed the wires I had soldered to the circuit board and lined it with a rubber grommet. I had an Accel 2‐pin weatherproof connector in the bin and decided to use it here to simplify detaching the opener from its mounting point when it becomes necessary to replace the battery.
In retrospect, I wish I would have applied a bit of shrink tubing to the wiring at its boundary with the housing in order to increase friction and add an additional measure of moisture barrier. I did bind the wires with some black tape where they meet the housing. I also should have penetrated the housing to one corner or the other (instead of the middle), as doing so would have simplified placing the wires out of the way of the battery, which occupies a cramped space. That said, the result was very satisfactory, and to this point had still not cost me a trip to the hardware store.
I stuck a generous piece of industrial‐strength Velcro to the opener. To keep the weather off of it as much as I cared to, I wrapped it in a small freezer bag — cutting out a hole allowing the Velcro to pass through — and liberally wrapped it all with duct tape. The opposing side of the Velcro got attached to the underside of the fairing insert, the Accel connector was joined, the two pieces of Velcro were seated against one another, and the fairing insert was screwed back into place. The adjacent photo was taken from below the headlamp assembly and shows the opener in position.
The job took maybe three hours, much of which was spent scratching my head trying to figure out the best approach to kludging together all of the pieces. I had the advantage of having previously installed the momentary switch, which itself took an hour or so; altogether, then, an afternoon’s work. Of course, having done it once, the results could be duplicated in considerably less time — but then, this is the only motorcycle I own, so it is unlikely I will need to reproduce the work any time soon. Maybe I could do something similar in my convertible.