Having spent a year with the work I did on the Yamaha to add plugs for my heated jacket and gloves, I reached a point where I was no longer altogether happy with it. The fittings are small for gloved fingers, they are awkward to reach when sitting on the bike, and the straps holding the caps onto the sockets are going to break off sooner rather than later. In the months after doing the work, I discovered that Powerlet makes a one‐to‐two splitter cable into which the two Gerbing coax males would fit to run against a single Powerlet socket, and so in addition to the other issues, fumbling to plug in two dinky fittings instead of one big fat Powerlet fitting started aggravating me.
A great many touring bikes come equipped with a socket in the fairing downleg for use with heated clothing. The FZ1 does not have a full fairing, but the placement of such a socket has seemed pretty handy when I have seen them up close on bikes that do have a full fairing. I decided to fabricate an approximation for myself.
This is the original doodle I did.
After pulling some of the fairing components off the bike and taking some measurements, I made a paper template to use to assess whether what I wanted to build would fit as needed.
This is a piece of 16‐gauge sheet steel cut to match the template. I offset the bolt hole slightly to the left of center in order to keep the left edge clear of a component in the existing hardware (seen below). I could have cut a notch in the left edge to accommodate that component and kept the bolt hole centered, but this worked out fine. One advantage I did not anticipate when I made the decision was that the rightward shift gives my hand a bit more room to reach behind the fairing to get purchase on the nut at its attachment of its trailing edge to its scaffold.
Here is the finished product, painted, creased, and with the Powerlet socket installed.
I replaced the existing bolt that attaches the voltage regulator with a slightly longer bolt and used it to fit the bracket. You can see the component mentioned above that I wanted to avoid when I offset the bolt hole to the left.
Finally, the fairing is reassembled, and the socket is ready for use.
I am going to live with this for a while. If I end up liking it, I can imagine re‐doing the work with a heavier gauge stock and powder coating it rather than using a rattle can.