Length: 19:29
Created: October 22, 2020
[0:00] What’s up guys? Are you looking to light up the night? Well SuperATV’s got the answer with our 5′ RGB LED Whip Lights, and today we’re going to show you how to install them on this Honda Talon 1000.
First, we’re going to remove all four seat bases, since we’re working on a four-seater today. We’re going to reach toward the front of the seat and there will be a lever. Just lift up on it and the cushion will remove, just like this.
Then we’re going to remove all the push pins securing the front center console into place. What I like to do is take a screwdriver, a flat head, and just angle it in there and peel the center section out. They come out fairly easily.
Once you do that, they come right apart. You can see how they pop together. Just take your flathead screwdriver and work it in there, then they’ll just pull out by hand.
Once you’ve removed all the hardware, just pick up on your center console and slide it back, then remove it from the machine.
[1:02] Moving on to the rear, we’re going to remove all the push pins securing the rear center console to the machine as well. Before you can remove your rear center console, you want to reach up through here and you’ll have your accessory plug here. Push down on the pins and then remove it, then you can grab your rear center console and lift it right up.
For this install, we’re going to be installing the SuperATV Rocker Switch Panel, which I highly recommend that you use. It has a great design and it gives you four extra slots for your rocker switches. It’s the only way to install a rocker on these machines in the best way, but when you install that, you have to make room for your wiring to run through your cubby here.
So that’s what we’re going to do—we’ll take a drill and go right here in the corner. Open this hole up enough so that we can feed wires through it.
[2:09] So we’ve made it large enough to where our rocker switch harness will slide right through the hole, just like that. That’s all you need.
Then we’re going to start running our wiring. The next thing we’ll do is grab our harness. You’ll have a few different leads—you’re going to have your hot and your ground, which will be here. You’ll have your two bullet connectors that will go into the controller, and then you’ll have this plug, which will be plugged into the rocker switch.
We’re going to grab these leads right here. You’ll have your relay, your hot, your ground, and this plug. We’re going to feed them straight up and underneath the dash, as far as we can get them.
[2:54] We’ve gone ahead and pulled our wires through. Like I said, make sure you have your rocker switch plug, your hot, and your ground leads, and then your relay.
On the Talon, they have a factory plug that’s a dummy plug. It’s located right here. So you’ll have a hot, which is your white, and a ground, which is you’re green. They’re not pre-wired from the factory, so we went ahead and wired up a plug. You have to pin them. You can wire it up any way you like, but this is the way we prefer to do it, so we’ll plug this in.
[3:50] Now we’re wired up. We have our hot and our ground wired in and ready to go. Now we just need to make a connection.
Obviously, these terminals are not going to work for this specific application. These whip lights are universal, so we’re going to connect the black to the black and then our red to the red.
We advise that you use a heat shrink connector, which we’ll be using today once our connections are made. We’re going to take this wire and run it through the hole in the console, coming from the cubby hole that we drilled.
So our connections are made. We did use a heat shrink connector, but any time I do wiring, I like to go through and tape it all up as well. It just makes sure you’re keeping the elements out.
[4:44] We all know when you’re riding and off-roading, you’re goin to get in that mud, water, dirt, and debris, wherever you ride. So if you can protect your electrical connections just a little bit more, it’s always worth that little bit of extra time. So we’re going to tape them a few inches past our connections. That way we know they’re good and sealed up.
If you wanted to get really fancy with it, you could just get a whole big piece of heat shrink—however you want to do it, the options are endless. Today we’re just showing you how to wire these up so we don’t go that in depth on camera, but obviously you do it however you like to wire things up.
[5:24] Now we’re going to grab this connector. Reach up underneath the dash and we’ll be able to see that hole that we drilled through our cubby.
That’s another thing that’s awesome about our switch panel—you don’t have to zip tie all your wires up when you want to tuck them away and make them look clean.
You can tuck them into that cubby and it’s a lot easier than tying wires up really tight, which causes resistance and heat, which can cause fires. Obviously we don’t want you guys having fires or anything like that, so we’re not going to zip tie these wires. We’re just going to tuck them all in there really nicely.
Now that those are ran where we want them to be, everything is still kind of mocked up at this point. Nothing’s set in stone where it’s going to be. We’re not all wired up yet from front to rear. We need to figure out where we want our relay now.
Again, I’m going to wait until the end to figure out where I want to mount this. I’m going to leave it hanging here, that way I know that I need to come back through and wire it in.
[6:30] Now we’re going to head back into the machine and start wiring up our controller. We just started running our wires back. I want to stay with the factory harness as much as I can. It’s routed like that for a reason, obviously—it’s away from all the heat, the prop shaft, everything like that. It’s always a good idea to follow the factory harness.
We’re going to look up through here and look for anything that’s going to make the wiring look bad. Again, just follow the factory harness. We’re going to get it back to this point right here and then let these wires hang.
For the next part, the controller is very simple to hook up. You only have two blade connectors out of all these wires. You have your red and your black. If you look on your harness here, you’ll have a red and a black. Obviously black goes to black and red goes to red.
[7:39] We’re not going to connect ours yet, though. We need to figure out how we’re going to run our whip light leads.
Where you’re going to run your whip light leads depends upon where you’re going to run your whip lights. We showed you how to do that, and my plans are to start running them back up through here. But first we need to figure out the best way that we can possibly route them, because obviously you have a left and you have a right.
This one’s going to go this way and this one will go that way. We need to go back here to the rear and figure out where we want our whips. We’re going to look around and find the best spot to run our wires up through.
[8:19] On the Talons, unlike on some of the other machines, they don’t have a lot of holes that you can feed wire through or anything of that nature. So my plan is, I’m probably going to end up drilling a hole through my factory bed, just so I can run my wires a bit cleaner.
If you come over to this side, the driver’s side, and look through here, you can feel the factory tail light harness running. So I’m going to run my wires right with the tail light harness and then right up in here, where it’s nice and tucked away.
I’m probably going to drill a small hole, just big enough to get my lead connector through there, and I plan on mounting my whip lights right here.
[9:00] I’ll go ahead and get the whip lights wired or mounted up. We’re going to grab our whip light brackets—if you already have brackets for your whips, you could have purchased them off the website with the brackets for the Talon. We did that. We’re going with the horizontal mounts today.
Personally, I like the horizontal mount because it looks really good and clean. That’s what we’ll be using today. We’re going to clamp it on right around this vicinity and then we’ll show you how we’re going to run our wiring.
[9:27] We’re going to grab our clamps and remove the Nyloc nut, then remove the screw as well. We’ll take this piece off and you’ll see inside of the clamp will be some foam. Take this foam, feel a little bit off, and then run it right here. As you can see, it has a section in the clamp—that’s where you want your foam. If you go past that, it makes the clamp a little bit harder to install.
Once we have it where we want it, you can just peel it right off. It’s easy enough, so it should look just like this. I like to have the cut outside, which is the flat side. I like to have it facing toward the back, so when you slide it on your cage, just make sure you have it going toward the rear or toward the front, that way it’s not facing outward.
When we install the other portion of our clamp, I like to make sure the threads are down as well. That just makes it look a little bit cleaner and nicer. It’s going to go through on the flat side of the bracket, so what you’ll have to do is crimp this together.
[11:02] Get your nut and start it. Once you’ve started it, you’ll just get a couple turns on it. You don’t want to tighten it just yet, because you obviously have to get it into position exactly where it needs to be in order to line up properly.
Once it’s started a couple threads in, you want to position it just right and take your bracket from the kit. Unwrap it and look it over to figure out exactly how you want it to sit. Obviously, you can angle this bracket a little bit. We kind of want ours to sit like that. We may rotate it a little bit or rotate it back this way, but that’s pretty much the vicinity.
We’re going to leave everything loose until we can put our bracket in place exactly where we want it. But first, we’re going to repeat the same steps on installing the clamp with our lower clamp. Just make sure your threaded hole is going up, just like that. It should be set up on the cage exactly like that.
[12:10] Now we’re going to grab our bracket and the hardware provided in the kit, with a short Allen and a lock washer. Obviously, the lock washer and nut or Allen will be threaded on just like this. We’ll want to rotate the clamps around until we get them lined up on the top and the bottom. Just take your Allen wrench and make sure you get a good start on them.
Now you can rotate this around any way you need—just set it up exactly how you want it, then fully tighten your hardware.
We’re going to disconnect the base from the whip. All you have to do is grab hold of the quick detach and pull down on it, and this pulls right out. It’s really easy to pull down and comes right out, no problem.
We’ll take our hardware off and slide it through the hole. Slide our flat washer and lock washer, then start our nuts. You can pretty much run it all the way up.
[13:41] Alright, we’re going to pop our whip on so we can figure out exactly how we want to position it and all that good stuff. Once you have it exactly where you want it, repeat the same steps for the opposite side.
Next, we’re going to drill a hole through our factory bed. You’re going to have factory hardware right here. We’ll go right next to it and drill a hole large enough to feed this connector through. Once the hole’s drilled, we can feed our harness straight through. Just repeat these steps for the opposite side, then we’re going to start running our harness off of our controller.
Now we’re going to grab our right or left, whichever you want to start with, and feed it on top of everything. Try to get them back there far enough to where you can reach in and get a hold of them. We’ll do that for both sides.
After that, we’ll head back to the rear and start feeding their wires. I’m going to grab hold of the wire and run mine and pull all the tension out of it—get rid of all the slack. I’ll run it right up behind the battery box, over top of this. Then we’ll follow that factory harness all the way here to our connector.
[15:31] There’s a little notch you have to line up on these connectors and obviously they’ll be the same notches on the plug.
Slide that together and then tighten the nut. We’re going to leave our wires hanging for now, but we’ll have to come back through and tie them up. Then we’ll go over to the opposite side and locate our wire. Come over here and grab the harness.
This side’s made a little bit differently. Really, the best way to route this is to go up through here and follow the factory harness all the way up, so it can be a little more difficult to do this. But if you pop these lower push pins out after you’ve removed the two lower ones, go ahead and remove the upper one as well.
We’ll just pull it down and slide our harness right up here to where it fits in this little channel with the factory harness, and we’ll just slide our panel back up into place.
[16:49] Now as you can see, it’s running like the factory harnesses. It’ll be so much nicer and a lot cleaner, without a doubt. Then we can just make our connection. Once you’ve done that, go ahead and put the push pins back in.
We’re ready to install the rocker switch now. What we’ll need to do is pop out one of these knockouts here. Just get rid of that—you’re not gonna need that anymore. We can take our rocker switch and make sure that the LED lighted whip is facing toward the bottom. Line it up and slide it right in, just like that.
Then we’re going to make our connection. Once our connection is made, like I told you earlier, I don’t want to bundle up a bunch of wires and zip tie them very tightly, or at all if possible. So what I’m going to do is take this bundle of wire and just tuck it into the actual cubby.
If you want to tie these up and do it a little bit more neatly, you absolutely can. But nobody’s ever going to see it, except for you when you remove it. So I don’t feel like it’s needed to tie those wires up, personally.
[18:33] We’re going to set it in here and make it good and straight. Then take the provided screws and apply some pressure, then do the same thing for the rest of the screws.
We went ahead and mounted our relay right here, so the plug is facing down. That way if you do get water or anything in there, it will drain out. Once you’ve done that, go through and make sure all the wiring is tied up how you like it.
Once you’ve done that, that’s how super quick and easy it is to install SuperATV’s 5′ RGB Whips on this Honda Talon 1000! For more information on these whips or any of SuperATV’s great products, feel free to give us a call at 855-743-3427 or check us out online at SuperATV.com. Thanks for watching and we’ll catch you next time.
2 Comments
If you don’t have a factory Accessory plug how can I wire the lights up
Hey Justin. Black goes to ground and the red goes to your key-on power source. You should have posts on your busbar or accessory bar at the front of your machine that correspond to those. You might have to check your manual to see which post is which before wiring it up. Thanks for watching!