I recently finished wiring some symtec heaters into the factory OEM system. After having a hard time finding out how to do it I thought I would share my work with the forum so people coming behind me would know how to do it. First let me say 95% of the credit should go to ABQFJR. He spent a couple weeks and about 25 PM's helping me figure out how to do this. He does not know me from Adam and was still willing to help me. Talk about a stand up guy. I'm not sure I could have done the same. Second let me say that I do not claim to be an expert on electrical matter, in fact all I really know is how to use a multimeter and how to connect wires. Luckily that is about all you need to know in order to make this work. Thirdly, I don't want to get into a debate about what grips heaters are better or why you should choose A over B. I went with symtec because I have used them before, they work well, and they are cheap.
The obvious question is why would you want to get rid of perfectly good heated grips if you have the OEM's on your bike. In my case I broke the throttle grip while trying to install a G2 throttle tamer. BTW, my grips where GLUED onto the bars and I tried all the tricks in the book to get them off without any luck. If you decide to install a G2, be warned. The other reason to ditch the OEM grips is because, IMO, they suck. They are very hard and I wanted to install some gel grips. Plus, I can't help screwing with my bike and trying to make things better even when it might not make them better. Make sense?
The first thing to understand is that the OEM grips are run in series and the symtec must be run in parallel. That doesn't really mean anything if you install them the way I show you, but it does help to understand that you won't use all of the OEM connectors (I will explain). As you can see in ionbeam's drawing, one grip is wired to the next grip, series. You are not going to do that. You are going to run positive (pos) to one grip, and pos to the other grip. Then you will run negative (neg) to one grip and neg to the other.
The first step is finding the pos wire from the OEM sytem and the neg wire from the OEM sytem. Each OEM grip has 2 wires coming from it with male connectors connecting to 2 female connectors (I don't know what you call that type of connector, someone can chime in) like the one pictured below. This picture shows the clutch side connector with one wire being nothing (actually its the wire connecting the 2 grips in series that you are not going to use) and the other wire is the pos.
I used a multimeter to determine which of the 2 wires had power. Remember that the engine must be RUNNING in order for you to get 12+ volt reading, without the engine running and just the ignition on I got 1.8V. The next picture below shows the thottle side female connectors with one being nothing and the other being neg.
You can cap off the "nothing" wires however you want to. ABQFJR told me he ran a wire from one nothing to the other nothing so that he could preserve the integrity of the connections. I just used some heat and melted the end closed because I knew I was never going to use the OEM grips again. Now that you have your pos identified and your neg identified you can hook up the symtecs. Each symtec heater has 3 wires coming off it, red, blue, and white. The symtecs are setup for a high/low switch with one wire to high, one wire to low, one wire to ground. You are using the OEM heat troller so that does not apply. You will run blue & red to pos and white to neg. I used waterproof butt connectors for my connections but you can use whatever you want.
You have 2 ends coming from the OEM system (1 pos, 1 neg) but you need 4 ends for connecting to the symtecs. For the pos side I used the male end with 2" of wire that I snipped off from the OEM grips. I used two 2" pieces of wire from the symtecs and butt connected them to the male end of the OEM piece of wire that I cut off. I then did the same thing on the neg side. Now you should have 2 pos wires and 2 neg wires. If you wanted to skip a connection you could run blue/red from one side of the symtecs and blue/red from the other side and connect all 4 to the pos. That would be 4 wires into 1 and I did not have a butt connector that would work well. All you have to do now is hook them up. Red/blue from one symtec to the pos and the white to neg. Red/blue from the other symtec to the other pos and the white to the other neg. Actually polarity does not matter so if you want to connect red/blue to neg, knock yourself out.
So how well do they work? I like the softer grips for sure. I can't say my hands are any less fatigued but they do feel better and give me the option of changing grips down the road if needed. Heat wise, the OEM and symtec are about equal. I would say that the OEM got hotter faster but that could be related to the different grip materials. If I HAD to do it over I would probably stick with the OEM grip just because it's a cleaner connection. The problem for me (or anyone else who loses a grip heater) is they don't sell just one replacement heated grip as far as I could tell. They don't even sell a SET of new OEM heated grips. I called Yamaha and they told me they only sell the complete kit. Anyway, I hope this information is useful to the next person that needs new heaters or wants softer grips. And again, thank ABQFJR. He did this before me so the credit should go to him. Enjoy!
