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2008 Concours 14

Audiovox CCS-100 Electronic Cruise Control Install

By Fred Harmon

The Beginning

First off, let me say that no matter how careful you are, anytime you introduce something into the throttle mechanism, there is a potential that you could cause it to jam on you at the wrong moment and this could result in injury or even death, so proceed at your own risk.

Second thing I would like to say is, there is no way I could type up each and every little step you have to go through to install this thing, and there are many possible variations to how it could be done. This is just to show you how I did it on my bike. I will do my best to cover the important points. There are many more photos of the process than those shown here. If you want to see them all you will have to go look at the gallery: C14 Audiovox Cruise Install Photos .

Murphs' Kits sells this unit, and he's one of us, so I would recommend you get one from him: Audiovox Cruise Control at Murph's

This Audiovox unit is not really made with motorcycles in mind, and everything is too big and the cable and wires are all way too long. This presents additional considerations when mounting.

First thing I did was remove the mounting bracket on the cruise control body and replace the screws. It only gets in the way and I was planning on zip-tieing it on the bike anyway, so I had no need for it. I installed it on the right side of the bike where the right glove box would be if it had one. I routed the long cable around the front of the bike all the way up into the nose under the headlights, and made a gentle arch all the way back over to the left side near the throttle. I looked at possibly shortening the long cable, but it didn't seem worth all the effort it would take, so I just used up the extra length by routing it around the front like this:

The Middle

Once I got the cable around and in place I began to look at ways to hook it to the throttle pulley. I really struggled with this as there really is no good way to do it with the supplied hardware. On the old Connie you could slip the loop end of the cable over the barrel, but due to the design of the pulley, that can't be done on this bike. There simply is no really nice way to attach it. I considered drilling a hole in the arm of the pulley but decided against that simply because it is part of the throttle body and if you mess it up, you would probably have to replace the entire throttle body at great expense and trouble. So I chose the path of least modification, and simply slipped the end over the arm, and routed the cable UNDER the existing throttle cable.

I removed the three bolts that hold on the engine brace on the right side and moved it out to give myself more room to work around the pulley. I also had to cut and permanently remove one cable strap tie on the main wire harness so I could mount the cable stop holder. When I put it back together, I simply added a zip-tie attaching the harness to the engine bracket to secure it, and I covered the back side of the harness with furry velcro so it wouldn't chaff on the bracket I added.

Also worth noting is that I had to significantly shorten the mounting bracket for the cable end, since the cable is so stinkin' long. When you are done you want very little slack in the cable so that when you set the cruise there is not a long delay as it takes up the slack.

Next I fabricated my own vacuum canister. I didn't want to use the one from Audiovox because it just seemed so large and I thought I might be able to make one that is smaller and more compact. It works, but I had to hook three of the four throttle body vacuum ports to it to get enough vacuum (you won't be able to get to the #2 port). I later ended up ordering the canister from Murph, as it still seems a bit slow to respond because it needs more vacuum.

Final install with canister

There were a couple tricks to wiring it up so it works properly. The first problem is that the LED tail lights prevent the cruise control from being able to sense ground when the brakes are off. On bikes with incandesent bulbs, the system can see ground through the lamps, but the LED's tail light blocks that current. The solution is to simply add a relay of your own, which is what I did. This relay is controlled by the brake light circuit so that when you press on the pedal or activate the front brake, the relay energizes. The wiper arm of the relay is connected to the purple wire of the cruise control and one contact goes to ground while the other goes to the brake light wire from the switch (blue wire with red stripe). The diagram looks like this:

The actual relay I used looks like this, and I tucked it in behind the back edge of the gas tank near the wire harness for the rear brake switch.

For the tach pickup, I simply used a Posi-Tap connector and followed the #1 coil wires back to where they entered the main harness and tapped onto it there. It was the white wire with the red stripe on it and if you carefully follow the harness back you should be able to see where it runs from and to. You will have to remove a bit of the wrapping if you want to access it from the main harness. You could also pick it off at the coil under the head if you don't want to open the harness, but my hands were too big to fit in there.

Since this bike does not use a wasted spark system like the old Concours, you will only be getting the pulse from one coil. The coils are all tied to a common ground (red wire) and you might be able to make it work off the red wire. I didn't try that, but I may experiment with it sometime to see if it works. Anyway, since you are only getting the signal from one plug, you will need to set the PPM on the Audiovox to 2,000. This means dip switch one and two should be down (off). You also need to remove the jumper next to the dip switch and set the unit to tach only (dip switch 3 off) and tach source to coil (dip switch 7 on).

When you pull in the clutch and the engine revs over 1,000 beyond the set point, the system shuts off, and this is the over-rev protection feature. It works well, and the unit seems to able to hold a constant speed very well with only the tach input. However, you can connect an electronic speedo signal to the Audiovox as well, and I may try that later to see how well it works or if it makes any improvement, but it all works fine with just a single pick off from the number one coil.

I fabricated a small bracket that allowed me to mount the switch on the right side handlebar. I know many folks put it on the left, but my Gold Wing has the cruise on the right, so that is where I am used to having it. I painted it black and called it good. Then I sealed up the back of the switch real well with RTV to keep water out of it, and covered the wire harness in one long piece of heat shrink and ran it down the handlebar stalk and routed it over to the main unit. I shortened the length of the wires on the main unit some so I wouldn't have a bunch of extra wire. I just cut them and soldered and heat shrunk all the connections, and still used the connector that was provided in the kit.

There is a gray and black lead that comes from the remote switch assy that is not identified in the documentation anywhere that I can see. This is for the lights on the remote switch. Gray should go to +12v and black to ground.

I did not wire the power lead for the main unit to the brake circuit like they said to in the installation manual, mainly because I didn't want to draw current from the brake circuit for fear it would fool the ABS brain box into thinking the brakes were on when they weren't. So instead, I drew power from the leads going to the ACC cig lighter plug on the dash, and just piggybacked onto them. I used the power from this same source for the gray and black wires to the lamps in the remote as well.

This is one man's way of doing it anyway; so far, so good!

Update January 8, 2008

If I was doing it again, I am not sure I would use the same cable attach method that I did. I was reluctant to drill a hole in the pulley arm until I was sure the cruise was going to work properly on this bike. Now that I know it does, I probably would just drill the hole and attach it to the pulley arm.

Another thing I should point out, is that I pinned the cruise cable in place on the throttle pulley by lifting the throttle cable out of the groove on the pulley, and putting the cruise cable UNDERNEATH, with the throttle cable riding on top of it on the pulley. This holds it in place and keeps it from coming off the pulley. If you drill a hole in the pulley arm and bring the cable up from the bottom like in Blaydes article, you won't have to worry about that.

Blayde's write up appears much more thorough than mine, and I suggest you follow his notes more than mine. The only real departures I would have, is I did not find a need for the "tach signal adapter" and just tapped right off the red/white wire to the #1 coil (with a Posi-Tap connector) and set the PPM to 2000. I also found it easier to access the brake light wires by following them into the harness near the rear brake light switch and simply slicing open the sheath to access them at the rear of the tank. I didn't have to remove anything to get to them in that location.

It is also worth noting, that after writing this all up, I found my home made canister leaked, and so I ended up ordering one from Murph, which is what I should have used in the first place. The supplied canister was really not much (if any) larger than my homemade one, and it also includes a check valve for one way air flow.

- Fred

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