Well, I had more time for documentation than I used for documentation. Mike and I started work at about 10:00 on Friday morning and worked, with only a few interruptions till about 11:00 that night. Then we worked again yesterday from about 10 till I left at 6:30. Mike stayed at it till around 10:30 and got back on it this morning at 10:30.
He just called me and had done the diagnostics and the Rostra passed itself. He's putting motorcycle back together enough to go for a test ride and, if everything works, he'll finish putting all the plastic back on then ride it out here so he can give me my bike back and I can give him his car back.
Mike said that in years past, he would have just blown through the job, maybe once or twice before finally getting it done right. He was pretty determined not to have many repeats on this job.
If you remember BobAgain's chronicles of getting the Audiovox CC installled on his bike, one of the biggest difficulties he faced wsa finding a way to get the CC linkage into a pretty limited space.
His efforts led Mike to think of a different approach that was, IMNSHO, pretty elegant and simple. Rather than using a bellcrank, Mike's linkage worked like this (I know, I know: pictures, pictures, pictures. I didn't take any. Mike did with his I-phone and I'll get them and post them here), but in the meantime, here's a verbal description.
The outside of the throttle mechanism on the NT has a pulley for the throttle cables. It's secured to the shaft that holds the butterflies by a nut. Mike's idea started with that nut. We bought a connector nut. Naturally, we couldn't find a 7mm connector nut, so he bought a 6mm nut and tapped it out to fit the 7mm shaft. Then he cut it so there'd be three or four threads on the shaft. Then he used fender washers. From the inside out, a 1 1/4" washer, two 1" washers, and another 1 1/4" washer. He ground down one side of the small washers, drilled and tapped three holes and screwed the four of them together with the cable for the CC attached to one of the screws.
That arrangement might have worked, but it was offset from the throttle cables by quite a bit and the CC cable rubbed on the rubber hoses for the air injection valve and, when the cruise control was slack, the cable looked like it might have the potential for jumping over the edge of the washer stack.
So we talked about that and analyzed how things were looking and went back to the hardware store. This time, we bought two 1 1/2" fender washers and two 1" washers. We drilled the hole in the middle so that three of them would fit over the coupler nut, and used a toothed washer on the inside and outside of the outside washer. This time we had four screws holding the washer stack together and the CC cable could move more freely over the one that secured it inside the washer stack. This arrangement reduced the offset enough to give a really straight shot from the end of the actuator cable to the pulley and eliminated the interference with the air injector hoses.
The CC module is mounted vertically in the area in front of the left fairing pocket. The actuator cable (which is long enough to work in a car) can't be easily shortened, so you've got to find a way to use up all of the length and get it back a precise distance from the throttle mechanism. We ran it across the front of the cowl and then back across under the front of the air cleaner and then turned it back toward the throttle linkage on the left side of the bike.
Between all the hardware that came with the Rostra and the stuff Mike had left over from an Audiovox CC install on a Concours 1000, we had lots of brackets and stuff to fabricate mounting tabs for the actuator and for the end of the cable.
He had located the wires that would serve as inputs to the actuator before he started and after getting the throttle actuator hardware fabricated he'd started wiring up everything when I had to leave for home so I could be ready to work this morning. He called me as he was getting ready for bed and said that he'd finish the wiring, run the diagnostics, and start putting things back together. I talked to him about two and he'd run into a problem with the diagnositcs not working the way they should.
It turned out that when I'd sealed up the control pad (the same one the Audiovox CSC-100 uses, BTW), I'd managed to get the cover on upside down. He turned that around and the unit passed its diagnostic tests. The only thing left to do at the point was to get the clutch / disconnect wire hooked up, get all the plastic back on and ride 80 miles back out here.
I'm getting excited! Sure hope it works. If it does, I'll get to ride it a meeting in Highlands Ranch tomorrow morning. It'll be about 105 miles and almost all of it will be on limited-access four-lane highway; a good test for a cruise control.
