Why the ADV nav tower is shaped the way it is.

The FTR's cockpit was designed for a flat tracker. Here is how the tower rebuilds it for a long day, using the stock headlight, and why the first one was laid up in a garage with a twenty-minute clock running.

4 min read

The Cannonball Moto ADV nav tower on the Indian FTR 1200, carbon fairing and stock headlight, from the rider's side

Ride the FTR any distance and two things wear you down. The weather lands square on your chest, and everything you need to look at is somewhere below the line you should be watching. The stock gauge looks good where it is, but it makes you take your eyes off the road. A phone or a GPS on a bar mount is worse. And there is nowhere to put a navigation device if you want to keep your phone out of the elements.

Indian designed that cockpit for style more than use. On a two-hundred-mile day with no GPX track in easy sight, a stock cockpit makes the riding harder than it should be.

Where a rider's eyes go

The first sketches were of the fairing composed on the bike. I was obsessed with the challenge of giving a bike with a classic seat-and-tank line a functional fairing that captured the energy, and that made it look better if I got it right. How do I design something that serves the purpose of a rally tower, the obvious answer to the navigation problem, without competing with the long tank aesthetic of the FTR? It needed to incorporate the round headlight the bike already has, but push it forward just enough to get both the dash and a Garmin into the rider's view. It needed enough angles to give it presence, and it needed to tie into the FTR's shoulder lines.

The ADV nav tower was my answer. Higher and forward to create space for the cockpit, the headlight just behind the front axle plane, and the instruments able to rotate to whatever angle the rider needs. Once those points were triangulated, everything else in the tower followed. The fairing wraps the assembly without overwhelming the bike, so the wind that used to land on your chest lands on the carbon instead, and your phone and instruments stay dry in the rain.

From a sketch to a shell

Sketching asks the question. Fusion locks it in. The 5052 aluminum tower weighs 2,100 grams, much less than many rally towers, and it mounts to a custom CNC head tube clamp that keeps the install reversible. The tower carries the headlight, the instruments and the fairing, and it has a small tray underneath for the things you want to reach quickly.

A failed print on the Bambu P1P in the shop, a nest of stray filament where a mold section should be — The mold sections came off the shop printer, and not every one of them made it. This is what a failed print looks like.

The stock headlight stays

This was a rule from the first sketch. A buyer should not have to give up a working headlight, cut a harness, or splice anything to fit the tower, and I wanted the lights to stay street legal. Baja Designs and Denali offer SAE lights, but they are not adding anything dramatic to the game, and buying another headlight would raise the cost of the kit and change the aesthetic further. Plus the round headlight is more in keeping with a nod to the history of the bike than some angular pairing. The harness extension lets you plug the light without modification. Nothing is spliced and nothing is cut. Take the tower off and the bike goes back to stock.

3D printing the mold for the fairing

The FTR is out of production, and this will be a low-volume operation for the few people who see the same use in it that I do. So the goal was always to hand-lay carbon fiber into a 3D printed mold. The shell is hand-laid carbon over a fiberglass core, clear coated so the weave is what you see.

The mold for the first fairing was printed in PETG on the shop printer, in pieces, then bonded and finished. The advice from people who do this for a living was that ABS bonds to the resin and PETG releases from it, so PETG it was. Three or four coats of paste wax on the mold, buffed between coats, then a film of PVA release over the wax, and hope.

I did a wet layup with the twenty-minute epoxy, got the bag on and pulled vacuum before the resin kicked. The vacuum bag is what turns a garage layup into a real part. It pulls the air out of the laminate, consolidates the layers, and gives you a mold-side surface you can actually clear coat instead of one you spend a weekend sanding. The first pull came off the mold cleanly. After that it was just polish.

What the first long trip changed

I tested the parts on trips. Part of the SEBDR and the Mid-Atlantic BDR Virginia sections, both directions from North Carolina, with the full kit and a week of gear. The tower did what it was designed to do. The wind came off my chest, the nav was always where I could glance at it, and everything just felt right, which is the highest compliment a fairing gets.

The drawing

The tee that goes with this part is illustrated the way a 1980s shop manual would have drawn it, with callouts, part numbers and codes, because that is the tradition the illustrations on this site come from. It is the one thing in the shop that is both the product and the illustration of it.

Design