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My personal journey into adventure riding

Adding a Centech AP-1 Auxiliary Fuse Panel to my 690

I want to introduce you to one of the main characters in any motorcycle. His name is ACC2. He consists of a small ground wire and a small positive wire. He has a brother called ACC1 that looks just like him. They live in the space behind your headlight.

While ACC1 and ACC2 look alike, they are very different. ACC1 will give you power all the time, while ACC2 will give you power only when the key is on. For that reason, ACC1 is usually ignored, while ACC2 is the Big Man on Campus. Everyone wants to be connected to ACC2. Conversely, almost nobody wants to be connected to ACC1. Aside from maybe an alarm, why would you want something that is always on?

Let’s say you want to add a USB Outlet to your handlebars? You’ll want to connect one of the wires to ground, and the other to something positive for power. You don’t hook that up straight to your battery. If you did, your bike would be dead in a day or two – as even if your not using it, a USB Charging Port always has a current draw. So you would look for somewhere that has power only when the key is on, right? That’s ACC2!

Let’s say you want to add daytime running lights? ACC2 is the guy.

Want to hard wire a GPS? ACC2 again!

Heated Grips? How about a Cell Phone Charger? Pretty much every accessory you can think of, you would want to connect to ACC2.

I am not an electrically minded person. I can understand in terms of positive and negative, and DC vs AC. Anything beyond that quickly gets out of my grasp. Terms like Amps, Watts, Common, Resistance, Neutral – forget about it!

What if you wanted to connect all of those things? That’s putting a huge load on just that little wire. I don’t need an electrical degree to see why the ACC2 situation is bad.

Bike manufacturers never visioned all the accessories we bolt on to a bike these days. They did give us a little help by wiring in ACC1 and ACC2 but it’s the volume of items that screws it all up.

Luckily, there’s smarter electrical people out there who create things that fix problems like this.

On my 2014 KTM 690 Enduro I wanted to add just about ALL of those things. They would all like to connect to something like ACC2 but can you imagine that?

HERE’S WHAT THE CENTECH AP-1 DOES

Correct me if I am wrong, but…

Here’s the Centech. It’s small. Barely larger than a credit card.

Explain it like I’m a 3rd Grader

What the Centech does is this. It pulls a big strong power supply straight from the Battery. It does the exact same for the Ground. It has 8 ports that you can plug 8 different things into to get power. That would normally be bad (as in always on) which is why the Centech also has a Big Ass Relay. That Relay simply pulls in a signal from our friend ACC2.

The Big Ass Relay

It (the Big Ass Relay) says, “if ACC2 is on, we’ll pass all of that super cool, straight from the battery juice to the circuit board, which then can power all your accessories“.

It also says, “If ACC2 is not on, we’ll also not pass any of our juices to the circuit board. None, Zero Zippo!”.

So essentially we now have a super powered version of ACC2 that we can tap into. It has 8 ports some of which share a fuse. If you look at the inside at the far left of this board are two poles + and – that pull in the big power from the battery.

This idea is nothing new. If you look at Rally Bikes with all of their computers, odos, roll charts, buzzers and trackers – they all have at least one of these, usually mounted on the tower somewhere. Overlanders will do something similar. It’s just the proper way to go. I don’t have a nav tower or a rally bike so this all had to fit somewhere.

I had cleaned up the rats nest of wiring behind the headlight a bunch and that was Step 1. That made it all cleaner but left little room for anything with the stock headlight.

Step 2 was to add the Ruby R7 as a headlight and make a bunch more room where I needed it. I had an idea that I wanted to Centech to mount somewhere behind the headlight but it had to firmly mounted.

I thought about mounting to the headlight bracket. That was certainly solid. The problem with that idea is that then you couldn’t remove the headlight mask easily – as it would be tied to the electricals of the bike. I thought about making it somehow quick release, so you could then remove it from the headlight bracket and have it dangle while you are working.

That didn’t seem very practical either. I was then looking at some sort of way to attach it to the bike itself. What if I ran a thin piece of plastic across the forks? Something like this?

So I started down that path. With the bulk of the wiring rats nest now cleaned up, I could hide so much of that behind the plastic as most anything I needed to get to would be the Centech in front.

I went down to TAP Plastics and bought a huge sheet of thin ABS plastic. It’s light, it’s flexible, and it was ORANGE!

The truth is, they had a wide array of colors, I could have been boring and done it in black. The blue they had just wasn’t the right shade of blue or I might have done that.

You can see in Version 1 I mounted the Centech as low as I could. I did a test fit and saw that I could and needed to move it up a bit.

So for Version 2 I moved it up a bunch and that looked much better. This is what the backside looks like.

Next up, I had to decide where to mount the Big Ass Relay. There wasn’t as much room in the headlight as I might have wanted. The relay is big, but it also had 4 very large wires going to it via a very large ass plug. Those large wires didn’t seem to bend very easily.

Looking at the right side of the bike there’s an area that’s also a connection for engine ground wires. There’s a plastic panel, and I was thinking, maybe this would all hide behind that. Here it is Red Arrow pointing at the bolt holding the grounds.

So I took that all apart and discovered it was an excellent area for the relay. There was plenty of room, it was protected by the plastic from the outside, the airbox on the inside, and it’s was also right along the highway of wiring that was already there – running from the battery area to the front of the bike.

So here’s the BIG ASS RELAY mounted. Some of those wires would run to the Battery, some would go to the front.

I then routed the wires where they needed to go and protected them in that flexible wiring wrap. Then I zip tied them to frame or existing wire bundles. I put the plastic back on and you would be hard pressed to even see it.

With the wiring connected, I tested the fuse block by turning on the key. Nothing smoked, no fuses blew, and my voltmeter ready 12 volts out of the Centech. I turned off the key and the Centech was reading no volts – Yay!

Next I did a final mount of the Centech mounting plate and then started working on my wiring.

I was looking to wire up my…

  • My Garmin Zumo XT
  • My Quadlock Wireless Charging Mount
  • My USB Port
  • My Heated Grips

Wiring the Garmin Zumo XT

This was pretty easy. All of the wiring came in the box from Garmin. The wire starts with a plug that connects to the back of the Garmin Body. It screws into the mounting plate. It has a rubber protected cable that leads to what I’ll call a small transformer box. From there a single red and black wire come out. There was way too much of the protected rubber cable so I wrapped it up and then zip tied the excess and the transformer box neatly up under the stock dash out of the way. From that it was a simple red and black wire that I snipped to the proper length and attached to the Centech.

I turned the key on and the GPS powered up! I turned the key off and the GPS turned off! Success!

Wiring the Quadlock

In starting this project I had just a simple quadlock. If I wanted to charge the phone there was a UB port right there. But like the GPS I really wanted it all charging, all the time. So I ordered the anti vibe kit, the wireless charger and then I was thinking I needed something like Garmin did to hard wire the GPS. I bought what I thought was right.

It looked kind of similar to the Garmin Cable. It had a transformer box, it had a red and black wire. I thought it would be the same. It’s not. It’s simply a USB Port. No matter what I did, the Wireless Charger Mount would need to be plugged into a USB and could not be hard wired. I already have a USB sitting right there – so this was returned.

The Wireless Charger is mounted to the antivibe, which is mounted to the ram ball. They gave me 3 different USB cables – Regular USB to Micro USB that plugs into the Mount. Oh well.

Wiring my USB Port

I had added the USB port to the center top mount clamp of my HDB a long time ago. Way back then, Tomm and I added a push button switch that powered my heated grips. It was a little complicated but the best way to do that at the time. Now that I had the Centech I could simple. So one red wire to the Positive pole of the USB, and one black wire to the Negative pole of the USB. Both connected to the proper side of the Centech. (it’s also a voltmeter). My wireless Quadlock charger is plugged right into it and I have one more USB should I need it.

Wiring the Heated Grips

While all that stuff was super simple. Red to red, black to black. The Heated Grips had 2 wires but also had a switch. I bought a new waterproof push button switch that also had a light. It had 4 poles on the back (because of the light capability). One Red, One Black and Two Blue Wires! I had to call in Tomm to clarify. While the directions showed it as a light switch, the basics were the same. Tomm said to wire it like this:

Talking to Tomm and the replacing the Green Batter with my Centech’s + and -, then replacing the light bulb with a grip heater. Here is what I interpreted that to be.

Tomm came over, looked at it all and agreed. Even he had to think about it slowly. I had just one more wire to connect. I connected it, flipped the key on and everything worked!

I buttoned everything up, finalized everything and since it was a beautiful day I took the bike for a ride. I turned everything on, turned things off, hit some bumps, did some wheelies. I got home and everything was still tight and everything was fully CHARGED!

Here’s the best part. There’s obviously a lot less stress on the stock harness and our little buddy, ACC2. All of my accessories get the best power. I’m not sure what the term would be but they are getting much more quality of power – just about direct from the battery.m My heated grips get hotter. I didn’t realize they would but now that they get all the power they are definitely warmer!

Does Your Bike Need a Centech AP-1?

I would say yes, but only yes..

  • If you wanted to add more than one or two accessories.
  • If you wanted to add heated grips (just for the increased heat)
  • If you had room to mount the unit, and the Big Ass Relay.

If you are happy powering everything from a USB Port or cig lighter – no need.

NOTE: This is the AP-1. There’s also an AP-2. We know that the AP-1 works like an super ACC2, the AP-2 does too but has a few ports that work like ACC1 (always on) and I have no need for any of those so it was the AP-1 for me.

Mike Mueller
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