i love the tombstone lights. nice!

 

Good looking mod for sure.....

 

And the cavity from the stock tail light didn't have to be filled in at all? That just looks a lot narrower...

 

please let us know what mods had to be done for that light to fit looks really good, alot better than the stocker

 

It was a semi-bolt on. Kinda. Sorta. I promise to post pictures some time - but it ain't going to happen tonight. Its -8 out and the bike is boxed in the garage right now. However, I'll do my best to describe -

There are two mounting points on the light - an upper and a lower. It seemed to fit the contour of the fender best at a spot where the upper ended up needing a hole right between the existing holes for the stock license plate mount - this required drilling a new hole, but it didn't bother me one bit because, one, the tail light covers it obviously, and two, if I went back to stock, the license plat mount would cover it. The bottom mount then was right at the place where the rectangular opening is for the stock light. So I got a six inch piece of flat metal from the screen door parts section of the hardware store, drilled a hole right smack in the middle and used that as a bracket of sorts to span this opening. Mounted the lower part of the new light to this metal piece (had to bend it a bit, but it worked great).

The wiring was pretty straight forward. I completely removed the stock circuit board, snipped the turn/tail wires right at the connectors, as well as the wires coming from the harness, and then spliced everything together using posi-tites. Very cool wire connector product, by the way. The tombstone light only comes with wires for the running light and brake light, so I had to add a ground for it to work. The light bulb is held in place with a metal bracket that screws into the tail light body. I just attached a ground wire to this bracket using a ring connector where it screws to the housing, ran it back towards the harness, and then connected the turn/tail/harness grounds together using a posi-twist - easy cheesy. I zip tied the turn signal connections to the mount where the circuit board used to be. I spliced in a few inches extra of wire for the brake lights and ran those into the housing, connecting and folding things up nicely inside the housing (makes it easier to get to if I needed to disconnect to get the tail assembly removed for some reason).

I'm no wiring whiz by any stretch of the imagination, and have nowhere near the fabricating skill of you and a lot of other folks on this forum, so you could probably do something like this in your sleep.

By the way, if interested in the posi-lock connectors as mentioned above, there are a few places online where you can get them in small quantities:

Custom Dynamics

Eastern Beaver - I kid you not

Eastern Beaver is run by some guy in Japan - but the shipping is actually cheaper than the Custom Dynamics shop here in the States...go figure. I've ordered from both with great success. Again - highly recommend these connectors.

 

I was a little worried about this, however, it just b-a-r-e-l-y covers - I mean, by a you-know-what-hair. There is a rubber 'gasket' if you can call it that between the light and the fender. With the light and this gasket, the hole is covered.

I should point out that I'm not the first to do this mod - I have to put out a big thanks to forum member Chipstah - a pic of his here. He's got one of these on his Bob, and once I saw it, I was sold.