Heated Grips on a Svartpilen

Or Vitpilen, I guess. Here's a few things that would have helped me to know ahead of time. You may have a smarter way of doing some or all of this, but maybe this will help guide your solution. Read the whole thing before following any of the advice, and use your best judgment.

"What grips" is also a good question; those Oxford grips are ubiquitous but the controller is kinda fugly. I'd gone with Koso Apollos, since the controller is integrated into the left grip. They have a pretty simple means of routing where the wires from both sides lead to a little box, which goes to power. The downside is that the switch itself takes up a little bit of hand room.

Both the Oxfords and the Kosos are available in 120mm, which is what you want for the Huskys.

Routing and Plastics

The Kosos have a decent length of cabling. There's enough length on them so that you can run them down inside the harness cover behind the headlight, then out on the left side alongside the bike's main harness. My priority was concealing as much added wire as possible. I think you could probably run the right grip out the right side along the headlight wire, if you wanted.

You have to make two cuts to do so:

Aside from being the deepest, the first cut is to the plastic harness cover on the top "bike-left" side. The Koso's left grip wiring is super thick, so this cut allows space for it to accompany the stock left-side switch wiring down behind the harness cover. I did this with a Dremel sanding wheel and a little file to clean it up -- nothing fancy. Smoothing the edges is key, though, since the plastic Bajaj uses on these bikes (feels like PA6, although I forgot to look at the markings) can take on a remarkably sharp edge.

Here's what that looks like once the wires have been run. Pardon the messy harness tape! Make sure not to pinch the wiring when reinstalling the harness cover or the headlight itself.

The second cut is to the leading left edge of the V-shaped cover. This cut will allow the grip wiring room to enter the cover. You can ignore that to the trailing left edge, which was to clear something else.

Here's what that looks like when they're installed. Hat tip to Bajaj for not welding my frame's mounting tabs for the cover on straight; it sat like this off the dealer lot. These bikes remain so hard to find that I was not of a mind to complain about it and go back to looking.

The Koso Brain-Box Thing

The main issue with the Kosos is the big "brain-box thing". There is basically no wire length on the downstream side of it which connects to the grips, which means that you need to install it very close to the bike's headtube. This is kind of a problem since that area on the Husky is packed with stuff already.

My solution was to use fancy hi-temp Velcro to stick the thing to the inside of the cover plate for the passenger seat lock, which you get to by first removing the ignition coil cover then poking a 10mm socket forwards behind the cover plate. In this location, the Koso's brain-box wiring sticks right up to meet the incoming grip wiring under the V-cover. Not ideal, but it works. The Koso has a ton of wire length on the power side of the brain-box, but I just wish the box itself sat close to power and they gave the grip side a ton more length.

Power

You could get fancy with this part, but I wanted something that a future owner (or me, I guess) could pull off very easily. With that in mind – and because the Husky has a fuse for an ignition-switched power source – I just used a fuse tap into slot 10. It has to be properly wired to the ignition since I work at a university, which means that on occasion people will mess with the bike's switches while it's parked, and I did not want to come back to a dead battery.

I admit that it's kind of weird to want an easy return to stock wiring when we've been cutting plastics. Two things:

a) I am a weirdo and I've bought and squirreled away duplicates of the harness cover and V-cover, so the bike can be returned to stock.

b) Cuts to plastics are one thing, but I hate buying anything with cut-up wiring because you never know what some moron did, and what'll short when you're 100 miles from home. This solution keeps me, a moron, away from the stock wiring.

Longer-term, the right move will be to find a proper KTM/Husky accessory power connecter to splice onto the Koso wiring and plug it properly into the bike's switched ACC plug. I couldn't find one and didn't want to put this job off; what I might do, actually, is buy the OEM USB port addition, then just clip its connector off and re-use that. Fuse taps are kinda hokey, but it got the thing working "properly", at the very least.

There we go! Heated grips that are only powered when the bike is, easily-removable, and with a minimum of added visible clutter. Aside from what's covered here, it's quite a standard heated grip installation job, which means that it's pretty easy but smoothing down the throttle tube is majorly annoying.

They don't transform the bike into a touring machine – and at speed, wind chill on the outside of your hand is always going to be the real heat-robber – but that extra little margin of comfort is nice. If I didn't have bar-end mirrors I'd probably try finding a way to make the Norden's handguards fit for some extra wind protection. It'd be cool if Husky made some to match the brushed aluminum flyscreen, too.

For now, though, this'll do.