Honda CTX700 Bestem 929 Install

This page attempts to document my efforts to get a top box on my CTX700. Take the time to read through it and get a jist for what was done before jumping in with both feet. After reading everything I could find about top boxes and the mounts for them, I made a decision to go with the Honda OEM rear carrier and a Bestem 929 top box. Other manufacturers like Givi and Shad have specific mounts for their boxes. Using Shad's mount prevents the installation of an aftermarket seat like a Corbin. The other factor is that neither Givi or Shad provided enough mechanical information about the brackets! I purchased the 92 box with the liner. On first opening it had a chemical smell so it went outside to air out for a few days!

I had installed the rear carrier a few weeks before ordering the Bestem 929 because I had yet to make up my mind to get the Bestem.. Accessing the connector to tap into the brake light power means removing the left sde plastic cowling. Yep you guessed it. The backrest brackets that hold the rear carrier need to come off to get the cowling off! I ended up removing the rear carrier by unbolting the passenger hadles and the backrest brackets. That way BOTH the brackets AND the rear carrier shelf came off the bike as one unit. Instead of just making brake connections I figgured I'd go the full monty and break out ALL of the electrical signals to the tail light adding turn signals and running LEDs along with the brake light.. Click HERE to jump to the installation

First things first. If you have a 700N, you need to buy the inner support brackets (08L72_MFJ-00) that go under the fenders to give the "backrest" brackets something to bolt to. CTX700 non "N" or those who have a fairing, already have them installed. They are what the passenger handles are connected to. The backrest brackets (08R71-MJF-A00ZP) support the rear carrier. They are mounted under the passenger handles and on top of the cowlings. The rear carrier (08L70-MJF-A00ZP) is the shelf that the T-Box will mount to. It's bolted to the backrest brackets.

P/N 08L72-MJF-A00

P/N 08R71-MJF-A00ZP

P/N 08L70-MJF-A00ZP
Here is what the OEM rear carrrier looks like
when installed per Honda's instructions.
This isn't the best look down view,
but you get the idea.

CLICKING ON ANY IMAGE SHOULD BRING UP A MUCH LARGER SIZE!
I ordered my 929 from Amazon. I chose to buy one with the liner but without the additional LED lights around the middle. I figured that if Bestem had a way to get a set of LEDs in there, I could too. removing the middle lens / reflector thing was kinda easy. The ends are screwed in but the middle is snapped in. With patience it all comes apart. My plan was to modifiy the top box first, adding brake, and turn signal LEDs into the lens of the box. The second part was to install an electrical break-out jumper in the bike's electrical harness to access the running, brake, left and right turn signals. The final step wouldl be actually installing the top box mounting plate. If the electrical stuff scares you, just jump to the mounting plate install and call it a day!

Modifing the 929
If you bought 929 with the inner liner, it's connected with Velcro. Just be patient and pull it apart and get it out of the box. If you look at the sides of the box you will see two sets of small screws. One holds only the outter reflector in place and the other also holds the internal cargo strap. Remove all four screws, pay attention that they are not the same legth. The longer ones go in the back. Set them aside for now.

 
 
CLICKING ON ANY IMAGE SHOULD BRING UP A MUCH LARGER SIZE!
The "middle lens" has three horizontal channels that are about a half inch wide. The top and the bottom channels make a perfect wrap around brake light. Two sets of white LEDs in the middle channel make two turn signals.. Running lights have to be amber in NJ. I installed a length of amber leds around the base of the OEM rear carrier.

Ebay and Amazon both have listings for 5 meter long led strip lights. They run on 12 volts and come in a few colors. Cost is about $15 per color. I chose to use the 5050 style leds. They are the largest and the brightest. The strips have a 3M adhesive backing. They normally are mounted to the strip in 3 led segments. I was able to get 24 LEDs into the top channel and 21 LEDs into the bottom channel. The current draw of 45 RED LEDs is about .8 amps. The factory LED brake light has a current draw of .260 amps. Adding in the .05A current draw of the brake light included in the 929 brings the total current draw to 1.11 amps. I would hope that Honda's engineering team designed the brake electrical system to handle a normal bulb. The additional .85 amps is nada. The GS-100A flasher has a MAX current load of 2 amps so we're good to go. Just in case of Chinese quality concerns, I bought a few of the flashers..

Taking a 2ft x 3ft sheet of standard thin poster board and cutting it down into three .5 inch wide strips provides a backing for the adhesive of the leds. The center channel gets two seperate strips of leds. One for the left signal and one for the right. Look Close at the picture below and you will see the poster board backing. Once the poster board strips have been measured and cut to length, just peel and stick the LEDs to them.

The waterproofing clear coating has to be cut back so wires can be soldered onto the foil. I used teflon coated 22 gauge twisted pair that I had in the scrap drawer. The most you will need is about 8 feet and that's allowing for mistakes! Once everything is soldered up the strips can be inserted into the lens face first. The red strips are for the top and bottom and the white for the center. I had aluminum HVAC tape available so it was used as a backer to keep everything in place. If you have another kinda of tape that will not dry rot, by all means use it! I set the lens into place and just before the ends I drilled 3/16" holes in the outter wall of the case to get the LED wires into the "cavity". The "cavity" is the slotted area in the middle picture below. I drilled another hole LOWER on the inside to hide the wire behind the insert. It's not "rocket surgery" it just takes time and patience.
The top two LED strips are red and the middle two are white. The top two form the brake light and the middle ones are the turn signals. The black area you see above the key is the gap between the two sides. I used a black sharpie to color it in. Not my best idea...

A weatherproof five pin connector that was purchased from Ebay for about $7. If you search for "IP68 connector" you will find a few vendors selling them. Because I chose to use the corner radius as the mounting location, the connector really needs to have a longer "neck" (about 3/8" ) to make it through the plastic wall of the Tbox. I had to modify the damn thing to get it to work, then used plastic rated epoxy to make sure the thing stayed in place! I used the "SP17" series that has a thread depth of about 1/4". If you op to not add the running light LEDs, mounting the connector on the bottom of the case is a good choice.

   
Inside the 929, the wires from the LEDS are soldered and heat shrunk to four single wires (22awg) that are then soldered to the IP68 connector. For added insurance, I heat shrunk the soldered pins of the connector. All the wires dissapear under the insert. The cable that connects the 929 box to the break out jumper has male 'bullet" style connectors at one end and the weatherproof male on the other. The entire length is about a foot. I used four 18 awg wires and heat shrunk them together to form the cable. Why use the 18awg wire you may ask.... it's because that's what was in my junk box! Running lights are on a separate 20 awg speaker wire cable that uses male and female bullet connectors under the rear carrier. That allows the top box to be removable without losing the running light leds.
 
CLICKING ON ANY IMAGE SHOULD BRING UP A MUCH LARGER SIZE!
 
Making the electical connections from the top box to the bike can get ugly. The connector that has to be accessed is under the left side cowling, that's why the rear carrier had to be removed. Instructions to remove the cowling are included in the inner support bracket pdf listed above. The only non obvious thing you need to know is that the "pop" fastners have a phillips head and they require a counter clockwise quarter turn to make them pop free. The remainder of the removal process is obvious.
MAKING THE CONNECTIONS!!!

The colors pictured are from the
FACTORY harness.

With the left side cowling removed you can see the connector for the tailights is to the right just above the "hook". There's more than enought room for the jumper harness and flasher unit in there!

One choice for making the electrical connections would be using 3M scotchlock piggyback connectors. I don't trust them. Instead I made a short jumper with matching male and female OEM connectors. Bullet connectors allow waterproof connections WITHOUT hacking up the factory harness. IF you want to go back to factory... remove the jumper! It's all just plug and play.

The brake signal on the male side of the jumper is connected to a pair of female "bullet" connectors. One for the input of the flasher and one for the laser stop light. The female side also has two, one for the OEM tail stop light and one for the Bestem 929 connecting cable. Left, right, running and ground are also broken out to female bullets. FOUR grounds are required (the picture only shows three, my bad).
A basic wiring diagram for it is here. The length of the harness is about seven inches. All of the "takeoff" wires that end in the bullet connectors are just soldered and heatshrunk to the middle of the run between the connectors.

OEM connectors are Sumitomo HV040 six pin Female p/n 6189-7040 and Male p/n 6188-4908
CycleTerminal.com has them and the bullet connectors too.
Making the harnes requires basic electtronic wiring skills. The wire was scrapped from a old PC power supply. It's 18 awg. Colors used were blue, red, yellow, grey and black. Red = Brake, Blue = Run, Grey = Right Turn, Yellow = Left Turn, Black = Chassis ground. Harbor Freight is a great source for heat shrink tubing. The jumper is about five inches long. A wiring diagram for it is here. The flasher unit was purchased from Amazon for less than $10. The It's only for LED lights. I didn't buy the crimp tool for the OEM connectors, I used a 9" pair of needle nose pliers to make the crimps, one side at a time then the connector was soldered. The sealing grommet is pressed into the hole after the pin is seated.
CLICKING ON ANY IMAGE SHOULD BRING UP A MUCH LARGER SIZE!
Hopefully these pictures will tell the story of how to install the pins. The female and male pins are assembled the same.
 
Crimp and solder...
Trim and crimp the strain relief "neck" ...
Push the grommet seal over the "neck"
Inserting the pins into the connector shell is easy. They only go in one way. So if it doesn't look like its working flip it over. Each pin will give a solid CLICK when seated. The grommet donuts may take a little time to get them seated, but in the end they should be just below the lip of the connector.
  Notice the location of the grey plasitic part of the connector. Its currently in the unlocked postion. IF you find it pushed further into the connector body, its locked and the pins will not insert. ONCE the pins are inserted, press the grey part all the way in so the pins get locked!

Along with adding the LEDs and a flasher unit, I decided to toss a laser stop line light into the mix. It sits on top of the rear fender just above the taillight attached with 3M double sided tape. It makes a red line in the road behind the bike. They are available on Ebay from many vendors for less than $10. Searching the term " Anti Collision Rear-end Car Laser Tail Fog Light Auto Brake Parking Rear Lamp" will get you in the right direction.

Connecting it is easy if you made the jumper cable. Because of the very thin wires from the laser, I added 3 inches of 18awg wire to the cable end. Heat shrink allowed was used to make everything neat, clean and secure.

One small note of caution.... On my first go round with these things, I purchased two units from the same vendor. The first one that was installed, died within an hour of initial use. Glad I bought two! The second unit died the same way. I made another purchase from a different vendor . The replacement was aluminum where the first two were all plastic. The build quality sucks. There's a inline box that needs to be sealed. I sealed the ends with silicone as well as the cable into the laser itself. Update 2017, the third lazer died too. I can't be sure how long it lasted. Bad hardware!!!


The laser mounts with 3M tape. Remove the above bolt to fish the cable.

Don't forget to reinstall the bolt after fishing the cable.
It takes a little effort to get the "box" to fit in there.
The "cable" to the top box and the zip wire needs the cowling to be notched a little to prevent pinching.
A little nip with a dremel is all it took.
 
It all fits in there...a scrunch here and a tuck there... its all behind the cowling anyway!
 
TOP BOX INSTALLATION
Now that all of the electrical connections have been done the mounting plate can be installed. I didn't use the installation hardware from Bestem. I chose to use standard "C" channel steel from Home Depot. It's thicker and I could cut the length so the support was from edge to edge under the rear carrier.
  Due to the layout of the Honda rear carrier's supports, the Bestem top plate needs to have the mounting holes closest to the outside edge enlarged into ovals. I'm not a machinist but I gave it my best shot.  
In an attempt and keeping the top of the rear carrier from getting scratched up as well as keeping the mounting plate exactly where I want it, I used a .125" thick closed pore matting material under the Bestem mounting plate. I don't have a source for the material. It was something I already had. Anything that has a little "squish" to it could be used.
 
The C-channel steel was cut so that it fit from edge to edge under the entire rear carrier. The outside length was 8" and the inside one was 8 7/16". This way there isn't a chance of warping the mounting plate or the carrier.
 
 
To mate up with existing holes in the mounting plate, hole spacing on the 8" channel was 1 3/4" in from the ends while the 8 7/16" channel was 2 1/8". The wider bracket is at the top of the picture. I painted them with Krylon gloss black to keep them from rusting. I wanted to use stainless hardware but Home Depot doesn't stock 5/16" bolts. I settled for good old zinc 5/16 " x 1 1/2" hex head bolts along with flat washers and nylon locking nuts were used instead.
  Before everything got bolted back together I installed amber LED strip lights on the outter vertical edge of the rear carrier to act as running lights. To make sure it stayed there,black GE silicone II was used as a seal on the upper and lower edges. The electrical connection is also sealed. Because the top box is much wider and deeper than the mount the silicone isn't really THAT visible. Bullet connectors make removal of the bracket easy.
 
 
 
The proof is in the pictures!
Can you find the laser?
The laser line is about 5 feet back from the bike.
Here's the LED running lights.
 

Video of the results are available on YouTube! Here's the link "Cheapotronx"

Any questions? email me.... kb2umj at that Yaa who dot com website that far too many people use!

12/20/16
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