I love the look of the shorty tail on the Royal Enfield Continental but it’s not always convenient and practical. Why not both?! Have your cake and eat it too! I customized the the wiring harness for the lights and the motorcycle tail piece so that I can quickly swap between the shorty tail and the full size tail in under two minutes without any tools.
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Video Transcript:
I have another little project another little customization I want to make on the continental. This is something I had mentioned a few months ago that I wanted to do when I did the short tail conversion on this bike.
So a few months ago I did the MK designs shorty tail conversion where you cut the frame put on the short tail, you put in the LED lights, and I also put in these extra little supplemental LED lights on this side here… turn signal lights. At the time when I cut the longer tail off with the full-size tail lights turn signals I said I want to keep the full size tail to make it swappable; when I cut this off to save the whole back as one unit one piece and then do a little bit of modification to it so like the short tail I will be able to take the short tail off and then slide this whole piece back in. So the idea is to be able to easily pull off the short tail and then put back on the full-size tail. Reason being this looks great, I love the way the short tail looks, it’s exactly the look I’m going for on the bike but it’s not always very convenient. Especially if you want to do some trips and I’d like to be able to start doing some longer trips maybe a little bit of camping and to be able to put bags on the bike and have the rack back on the bike. To do that I’ll need to put the long tail back on, so here’s my idea…
Okay so here’s my idea – obviously I have the short tail on here here is the original full-size piece so we’ll be able to take this off and then slide this on. Obviously when I do this it’s not to support the weight of a person, I’m not going to put the full size seat on it’s just enough make it strong enough to be able to handle bags and also to be able to put this rack back here again back on the bike.
So I already do have it set up where if we take the side panel off and pop off the seat and you see the short tail is connected with just these two bolts. Undo these two bolts, slide this out and be able to swap the new one on. Now the wiring harness, I can unplug the wiring harness here but two things unfortunately right now the way I have it set up these supplemental little side turn signals are wired directly into the short tail so if I pull the short tail off the wires go right here and obviously these things are bolted on so I wouldn’t be able to take it off. So I’m going to have to change the wiring a little bit so that way it can stay connected even when I pull out the short tail. Also this wiring, if I’m going to be plugging things in unplugging plugging in unplugging, there could be a good chance of a failure point. Meaning some of these wires might be a little bit loose and I don’t want to swap it out and do something that might blow my turn signals or my tail lights and cause any kind of problems.
So I did get some new wiring harnesses and these things are a little bit bigger so that way it’ll probably be easier to plug in and unplug as needed. I’ll put a new harness on the tailpiece, a new harness here on the stock, the original tail. Now obviously the other thing I have to do with this tailpiece is we have this one inch pipe that goes into the pipes, so I’m going to need some sort of coupling to be able to connect it. I looked for couplings that would fit, I couldn’t really find anything so what I did was I do have this one inch pipe that I’m going to cut to be able to slide in But obviously a one inch pipe can’t go into a one inch pipe so my idea is to cut this pipe to the size I need and then put a slit in it so hopefully the slit will allow me to compress it just a bit to be able to slide in and out and keep a nice tight fit. But right now you can see I have it already set up with just these wing nuts so it only takes a few seconds to unscrew and then be able to slide this whole tail right off. And like I said, I want to change the harness to make it easier, probably have it pass over the top so that way I can easily swap this off and put on this stock tail.
All right let’s cut this thing up and see if we can make a coupling for this so that way I can compress this part to be able to fit into the tailpiece. Then this will go into the motorcycle frame. All right hopefully that will work let’s give it a try.
So I have got these in and took a hammer to get these things in so they’re in there nice and tight. I still might drill a hole and put a screw on each side just to make sure they don’t come out. So now we should be able to pop off… uh let’s say use two hands take off the short tail… and this, it now slide right in there like that. Put the two screws right through here this is plastic. I am going to reinforce, I’m going to drill through put metal uh kind of washers in there and reinforce it a little bit but this post should hold it. I mean they’re pretty strong they’re not going anywhere and then the screws to hold it in place just so it doesn’t shake out just what does it slide out of place. And I think it should be good.
So I’ve got this done, I put on a new wiring harness on the bike and I put on a new wiring harness for the short tail. It has this little weather stripping so it should make a nice tight seal. I got it done on the new matching wiring harness on the long tail so I just want to test them out make sure they’re working correctly. It should be as simple as just sliding in and then plugging in the harness. I’m not gonna put the two bolts in right now because I just want to swap it out make sure the lights are working. So yeah, tail light, brake light, right… left perfect. And then to swap I should just be able to plug the harness, slide that out and let’s test the full size tail. Slide it in that should go up like that and then plug it in the wiring harness turn that. Try the brake light, left turn signal, right turn signal, and we also do have the plate light – all good.
So now what I want to do is put on the racks the bags, the seat, everything just to see how it all fits. And I will put in the bolts the bolts, just with the wing nut under there, put on a washer. Yeah like that.
So now we’ll just see how fast we can do a change. Take the seat off, unscrew the bolts. I think the trickiest part will be not dropping the bolts when you do it. Unclip the harness, remove the tail, swap in a long tail, plug in the harness and then slide in the bolts. All right, let’s figure out probably a little bit better way to position the wiring harness. There we go, all done.
The only thing left I really have to do is figure out a quick switch for the license plate so I can switch between this tail and the full size tail and I have an idea for that just having to do it.
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