Modern Vespa

I was a bit inspired by a facebook video I saw a couple of years ago on fitting bar end indicators in a non-standard way - using springs to hold them in place.

After finally biting the bullet and buying them, I found the fitting pretty easy. A week earlier I gave a hand to a friend fitting them to his Bajaj. He was a bit put off by the method in the video and decided to mount them solid like it says in the SIP instructions. Looked good and worked fine but you definitely need the grips made to suit - they have a little 'foreskin' that you can peel back to screw the lights into place... you need to drill a hole in the tube to fit it.

We bought the SIP ones rather than the Hella genuine ones, which turned out to be lucky because, as SoCalGuy mentioned the Hellas have a single wire and earth is via the gear/throttle tube. Which wouldn't have worked with my system. The other bit of luck I had was getting some bicycle grips (was looking for foam but they didn't have any) which were quite long compared to the originals, and they already had a hole in the end.

The grips overhang the gear/throttle tubes by about 10mm and kind of locate the indicators. I put a wire loop through the plastic hole in the indicator and attached a long, narrow "throttle return" spring to it. The spring and electrical wires were threaded through the tubes and poke out into the headset. So now the indicators have a 'spring back' function almost like modern cars have on the mirrors. I had a little difficulty in finding the spring, auto parts places didn't have them and finally got some from Masters (which I guess is something like Home Depot), hidden deep in a drawer in the bolts aisle.

I should say that it'll work without using the bicycle grips, but won't have the flexibility to be able to bend right back. That's because the indicators are about 1mm smaller than the bar it fits into... SIP supply a bush to make it a fairly tight fit.

I'm pretty happy with them and makes me feel a lot more visible, especially at night.

Throttle side spring is hooked to the clip, gear side is hooked to a large washer with a slot for the wires (which I got rid of a while back). I should probably wrap the wires to avoid chafing (although now 5 years on this hasn't been a problem).


Here's the original video I saw. https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1843603133769

Damn nice work, Ginch!

I thought about trying to work out how I could fit bar end indicators on my VBB because it's always bothered me a little to ride without turn signals, but between it being battery-less and the fact that sorting out a switch was always going to be a bit of an issue and I never actually did it.

Maybe this will inspire me again, unless I sell it to make room for the next project, which could also happen.

Well done man! That custom-made eye hook thing for attaching the lights to the spring is the ticket. We need to put ours back on now that we have new grips... we may use this technique.

I find I need to re-adjust them from time to time, as the grips allow it to droop if it's knocked that way. But that's no biggy.

At the same time I also converted to all-DC and floated the stator, but that's a story for another day.

Very clever. I take it this means that if you did happen to bump one of them while navigating in close quarters, it would just get popped out of the hole rather than breaking off? I'm gonna call that a bonus feature!