It is a cliché, but you can tell the SW-Motech auxiliary lights were designed in Germany. The quality is outstanding. Fitting them to the Yamaha Tracer 9GT took longer than expected. Not due to any fault of the lights, more the Tracer’s compact design, requiring some inspirational thinking when it came to routing the cables.
Steve Downer, the creator of the perfectly designed GPS mount for the Tracer 9 and Tracer 900, has refined the design to give a firmer platform to the heavier-weight GPS that are becoming popular. I never experienced a problem with the original, but I can see how Steve has improved the GPS mount.
And lastly, but by no means the least, I’ve finally fixed the Yamaha Tracer 9 seat. I’ve no more need for the block of foam I’ve been using to make distance riding possible.
I best get into the details.
SW-Motech Fog/Spot Lights
With my own cash money, I recently bought a set of SW-Motech engine bars for the Tracer 9GT. There is nothing wrong with the crash bungs from MCS, but I needed somewhere to mount a pair of riding lights, and whereas Yamaha manufactures a bracket, it is £129 and is designed to work only with Yamaha’s lights.
Along with the bars, SW-Motech kindly supplied a set of fog lights and asked us to test them on the Tracer 9 GT.
Normally, my view on the cost of a pair of auxiliary lights is that they are all too expensive. After a lot of messing about, I put a set of Chinese 9,000-lumen lights on my KTM – with 3-stage variable brightness – for £180. [See LED Auxilary Lights]
If I can do that, why do SW-Motech ask £280 for their lights and £30 for the engine bar mounts?
The answer is very simple: Quality, or rather I should say, “Phenomenal quality”.
The SW-Motech lights are in a different league. My high-power lights from eBay worked well, but there is no comparison with the SW-Motech lights regarding value for money. One set is made to a low price point, and the other is engineered for reliability and longevity.
I made the wiring harness for my KTM lights, which I thought was a good job, but looking at the wiring harness that comes with the SW-Motech lights, my effort was rather amateurish.
The SW-Motech harness comes complete with a relay, switched live connection, illuminated handlebar switch and sheathed cables, all sealed against the elements. All of the connectors are waterproof and push together with a resounding click.
They even make one of the cables that run to the lights longer than the other to accommodate running the wires from one side of the bike to the other.
The mounting brackets for the lights can be attached to any of four different points around the outside of the light. If I wanted to, I could install the SW-Motech lights facing forward but hanging upside-down from the crash bar clamps that themselves were pointing sideways off the bike. The mounting system is genuinely that flexible.
Thanks to Yamaha not leaving even the smallest of gaps under the tank, installing the SW-Motech lights took me longer than it should have, but that is nothing to do with the lights.
There is so little space under the tank on the Yamaha I needed to try several different cable routes until I was satisfied.
Having everything installed and connected to the HealTech Thunderbox, I did wonder where Yamaha connects their factory fog lights. The connector on the Yamaha lights looks unique and would require significant modification to the SW-Motech wiring harness to make it match.
Happy with my efforts, and with all of the Tupperware reinstalled, the lights look impressive. The ThunderBox supplies power to the lights once the engine is running, matching the design of the Yamaha headlights for function and colour temperature.
To give you an idea of the intensity of the lights, the photo above was taken on a sunny afternoon.
Printed Parts GPS Mount
Steven Downer kindly supplied an updated version of his excellent Tracer 9/900 GPS mount for us to test.
Gone with the new version is the RAM-style ball mount and the short extension arm, replaced by a flat plate to which the GPS directly attaches.
The redesign minimises vibration by removing the short extension bar. Personally, I never noticed any movement, but overall it is a tighter fit, which can only be a good thing.
The simplicity of Steve’s design did once again confuse me. Why is it I have trouble with the simplest and easiest of things? I seem to want to invent problems until I stop being an idiot and realise how easy it is.
This time it was the small lip that Steve had designed into the mount to ensure an even closer fit around the screen adjustment handle. The lip goes under the top of the handle while the rest of the GPS mount fits as before.
Naturally, the screen adjustment remains fully functional, and I can confirm that you can mount a Zumo XT with an MRA Vario Screen without any issues.
The viewing angle is ideal, and with the GPS sitting slightly deeper behind the screen, it gets even more protection from the elements.
The new version of Steve’s GPS mount is an improvement over the original, and there is an argument to be made that as the original was so good, why upgrade?
Then again, with the updated Printed Parts GPS mount costing £35 plus shipping, maybe it is.
Tracer 9GT Seat Modifications
I’ve been having an ongoing battle with the seat on the Tracer from the day I bought it. The first 1,000-mile road test we completed turned into the tour-de-pharmacy, considering the number of paracetamol I needed to take.
After a lot of messing about, a simple piece of foam turned out to be the best temporary solution to the Tracer seat, while a permanent fix took a little more organising.
I had the standard seat reshaped by Core Motorcycle Seats in Lincoln. They widened and raised the front quarter of the seat to give it more of a slope, which was an improvement but not the whole answer.
Joe Kelly in the USA (jk3d.us) has developed a clever shim kit that takes around 15 minutes to fit and raises the tank on the Yamaha Tracer 9 and 9GT by 6 or 8mm. The reason for raising the tank is that the front of the Yamaha seat latches into the brackets that also retain the tank.
The effect is to raise the front of the seat, and this, coupled with the work Core did to reprofile the Tracer seat, has made long distances on the bike a pleasure.
And to prove the point, I decided to ride to Scotland and back across the Pennines, covering over 450 miles in two days without needing to detour via pharmacies.
Before fitting the JK3D’s kit, I was concerned that the lines of the panels would look odd, but my fears were unfounded. Despite having raised the rear of the tank by 8mm, all the panels are aligned, almost as if they were designed with this mod in mind.
Next …
I’m coming up on the 12,000-mile service being due, and I’ve munched my way through my second set of tyres [See Mutant Munching]
Summer has arrived in Europe, and I feel it is time to visit the Herz mountains. Or is it a forest. It’s all go around here.
