A few months ago, I replaced my stock clutch perch with an ASV C5 lever/perch/hotstart assembly. I’m really happy with it, but at the time of installation, I was a little nervous. When I pulled the stock clutch perch, I realized that the new perch didn’t have the same clutch switch for the starter that the stock one has.
The purpose of that switch is to ensure that you don’t accidentally hit the starter button when you have the bike in gear but the clutch lever isn’t pulled. That is, when the clutch is pulled, it activates a switch in the perch that completes the starter circuit so that the bike can start. (I would have never thought this was a good idea until the two times now that I’ve accidentally hit the starter button with my hip while loading my bike…which, thankfully, wasn’t in gear.) It was essential to find a work around for this so that my bike would start with the new perch that lacked the clutch switch.
I did some research online and found people saying “just short circuit the switch/wires”. I’m not much of an electrician, so that didn’t mean a whole lot to me, so I had to do some guessing. I figured that if the switch allows the circuit to be completed, then just hardwiring the two leads together should fulfill that.
I removed the old clutch perch and disconnected the leads from the switch. Those leads come out of the same wire wrap that goes to the kill switch. I didn’t want to undo that entire wire wrap back to the previous relay and short circuit it there because 1) that’s a lot of extra work and 2) I like to easily be able to undo things that I’m uncertain of. I decided, at least for now, that I would just perform the short cicruit right on the bar near the kill switch.
This is where my memory gets a little fuzzy as to what I did and I don’t want to undo my work to look at it. I either taped the two leads together with electrical tape so that they were touching or I used a short piece of wire to connect the two leads together. I’m pretty sure that I used the short wire method to ensure a good connection, but I can’t remember exactly. I then tightly wrapped the short circuit with electrical tape as snug as I could back to the branch from the main wire wrap. I folded the new connection back along the back side of the handlebar (to protect it as much as possible) and zip-tied it to the bar.
That was back in October and it’s still holding and working great. I could undo it and spend the time to fix all the wiring and remove it from the kill switch wiring, but this is working fine for now and it allows me to easily go back to my stock clutch perch if I need to for any reason. I’ve included as many pictures and diagrams as I can (without tearing my work back apart) for reference. If anyone comes a cross a quicker, easier, reversible, more elegant solution, I’d love to see it. Please comment below with any of your ideas.
