12V socket for NT700V Deauville

Surprisingly Deauville, supposedly mid-range touring bike, does not come with 12V socket as standard. Honda sells insanely expensive one as accessory, and you also need to to buy a wiring harness piece to go with it (also insanely expensive). So here is how I installed a socket that I bought from auto parts store. The cost of all parts totaled 10 EUR, and it took few hours of fiddling with plastics and cable ties from me.

The parts I used:

12V socket
2 m piece of black wire
2 m piece of red wire
In-line fuse holder
2 flat push-on terminals to connect to socket
2 ring terminals to connect to battery and ground, for 6 mm bolt (in retrospect, it would have been better to have the other one to be 10 mm).
a handful of black cable ties

First some paneling from left side of the bike had to come off, and you can see the wire starting to go into place, with connectors already crimped to socket end.

Then I made a hole in left side box for socket, and fitted in with two screws. Don’t be tempted to install it any higher along the wall of the box, as this will make it very hard to get the box back in. Also, the way I placed the socket makes it possible to insert quite long connectors into socket without problems. I drilled an initial hole with 22 mm wood drill bit that I had, and then just widened it to eventual needed size with a knife, the plastic is quite soft.

Getting the bottom screw in was a bit of a pain, a socket with contra nut would have been easier but I just used the one that was available at a first store where I went.

Now I connected the cables to socket, put the box back on and strapped the cable onto wire harness with cable ties, making sure that there is enough free play at the top so that I can take the box off and disconnect the socket should I need to. You can see the twisted red/black pair attached to wire harness below.

Once the cable was set, I measured and cut the red wire to add a fuse socket. The socket came with preinstalled wires, and I attaches one end to cable going to socket, and crimped 6 mm ring terminal to go under battery lead bolt to the other end.

Here you can see the soldered connection. Hidden behind body panel are two layers of heat-shrink tubing waiting to be slipped over the soldering joint.

Here is the finished connection with the first layer on.

And finally for ground connection I crimped another ring terminal to the black wire, and then cut it open and widened a bit to fit around the thick bolt that you can see on the picture, between frame piece and plastic/metal piece behind it. The ring terminal on the fuse wire went directly on battery, and then I just tied the last bit of cable down and inserted a 10A fuse into fuse holder that you can see on the top center of the image below.

Then all that was left was fiddling all the plastics back on and I was done. There are pros and cons for attaching the socket directly to battery. The biggest problem is that if you leave anything connected to socket with a bike not running, then it can drain your battery. On a positive side, the socket can be used to charge a battery without taking anything off the bike, and thats a reason I did not use switched power because in here the bike will sit in garage half the year, and I want to have trickle charger hooked up to battery during that time.