Here’s the tough part. We removed the FZ6’s large half-fairing entirely. Our initial thought was to trim the screen, maybe black it out or do something else to make the bike cosmetically more enticing.
No dice. The broad hunk of ABS was killing our streetfighter mojo, so into the recycle bin it went. In its place went a lot of one-off fabrication following several hours of head scratching and website browsing. As the centerpiece, we chose the Acerbis Cyclops headlight. It’s intended for off-road vehicles but includes DOT-approved headlights—a projector-beam low and a conventional H3 high beam with an embedded marker light.
Removing the FZ6’s fairing and holding the Cyclops to the triple-clamps proved a couple of assumptions. One, the stock instrument cluster wouldn’t fit; we’d need something more compact. Two, bringing the Cyclops forward on some sort of mount would be necessary to conceal the wires for the instruments, headlight and turnsignals, in addition to making room for the clutch and throttle cables plus the brake lines. (If you’re old enough to have had a Universal Japanese Motorcycle, an old-school standard, you remember that the headlight shell was a busy place.)
Our solution was a pair of simple brackets made of .080-inch-thick, aircraft-grade 6061 aluminum. Stainless-steel clamps wrap around the upper fork tubes and pick up the aluminum plates, which extend forward to the headlight mounting tangs just behind the Cyclops’ face. A bit of time with cardboard and a ruler got us the prototype, whose shape was transferred to metal. Another aluminum piece was fitted between the vertical plates to pick up the instrument cluster bracket.
We painted the upper portion of the Cyclops fairing (if you want to call it that) with ColorRite products to match the Yamaha’s dark blue main color.
Replacing the stock instrument cluster is a Koso RX-1N motorcycle gauge pack. This small, lightweight module includes all the indicator lights, an analog tach, a digital speedometer, two tripmeters, a shift light and a fuel gauge. It’s customizable for many bikes through an on-screen menu system.
It is not, however, anything approaching a plug-and-play option; it must be spliced into the system. Most of the wires going to the stock cluster can be rerouted directly to the Koso, but a few, like the speedometer, tach and temperature displays, need their own sensors. Which means running wires to a wheel-speed sensor (for speed) and one side of an ignition coil (for rpm), and installing special temperature sensors (for oil and/or coolant temp).
Unwilling to cut into the stock main harness, we cannibalized the sub-harness that runs inside the FZ6’s fairing, where there are all the wires for the cluster as well as headlight and turnsignal wires. Plan to spend a couple of days to join the wires, add the sensors and get everything working. More information.
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