Triumph Bonneville Motone Brake Light Upgrade

Changing the rear brake light housing on your Triumph Bonneville is a great way to improve the look of your motorcycle. Many riders want their Bonneville’s tail section to look sharper, without going as far as a tail tidy. That’s why this STOP light and bracket is such a great upgrade for the Bonneville.

The Miller Light Bracket and Black STOP Light is one of the best looking Triumph Bonneville brake light mods you can do. It will improve the look of your Bonneville while still maintaining a retro vibe, and give you plenty of visibility for safety.

Installation wasn’t quite as plug and play as expected, and I had three issues with the product, but overall I’m happy with it. Have a look!

In the past, I have done a fender delete on a previous Triumph Bonneville. Many Bonneville owners agreed that the original tail light is too bulbous and ugly. However, many of you also let me know in the comments that you actually preferred the stock fender over the Bonneville tail tidy.

The Miller Light Bracket and Black STOP Light mod is going to let you keep the stock rear fender, while still having a much more attractive Bonneville tail end.

Removing the original brake light and turn signal mount

To remove the original brake light and turn signal mount there are only three 10mm nuts to remove from under the rear fender.

You’ll see a cable running along the right side of the underside of the rear fender. Remove the front seat, follow that cable, and unclip it from the main wiring harness.

If you want to make life easy for yourself, you can use some T30 torx bits and just take the entire rear fender off.

The only tricky part is are the little rings that hold this in place. The two plastic clips holding the wiring in place at the end of the fender are the two hardest parts, just pull them carefully.

Now you’ll be totally free to remove the original brake light and turn signal mount, as well as free to remove the entire rear fender from your Triumph Bonneville.

My issues with this Motone product

I’ve heard a lot of good stuff about Motone over the years. I’ve also enjoyed their Bonneville tail tidy product for this motorcycle in the past. Unfortunately, I think my expectations were too high when it came to the Miller Light Bracket and Black STOP Light mod. There are three things about it I don’t like.

Firstly, why is the bracket this wide? I know that license plates are different sizes in different parts of the world, but that’s why I assumed when I looked at the pictures when I bought the motorcycle that it was width adjustable. Unfortunately, it isn’t. You end up with a bracket that sticks out 15.5” across, well beyond your North American license plate. It’s even wider than the stock bracket on a Kawasaki Vulcan 900 Custom’s original piece, and it just looks really ugly and poorly planned.

My second complaint with the product is the tail light’s screws don’t line up with the holes in the back of the bracket. You end up either needing to drill the holes larger yourself, or else break you tail light. I opted to accidentally break my tail light. Luckily Motone sent me a replacement one. Then I just drilled the holes bigger as the holes didn’t line up with the new tail light either. What a waste of time and a bummer.

The third issue was the easiest to correct, but still also still annoying. The kit doesn’t come with hardware needed to mount it to the motorcycle. It’s branded as a plug and play part, but you’ll need to go the hardware store to get three pairs of nuts and bolts in order to be able to mount it. This isn’t a big deal, however, given that this part is made specifically for the Triumph Bonneville and is not a universal piece, you think they would know what size hardware it needs, and include it in the kit, even though it may cost the company an extra $2. That extra $2 in cost would save each customer half an hour of driving around, but Motone couldn’t be bothered.

Finally, there was one more issue with the product but we won’t see that until…

Installing the Miller Light Bracket and Black STOP Light

Once you have your hardware sorted out it’s easy to bold the brackets together and to your Triumph Bonneville’s rear fender. The kit comes with a wiring harness that will plug directly into your Bonneville’s wiring harness connection, and then to your turn signals and brake lights via butt connectors.

It’s a good idea to test your wiring before installing everything. I found that the colors coming out of the brake light did not match the colors going into the wiring harness. It’s not wired red to red. It’s wired yellow to red, and then red to blue. If you simply matched the colors your brake light would always be on, so don’t do that. See my video if this is unclear.

Given that Motone sells this as one kit that comes together, it’s disappointing that the colors in the wiring they use don’t correspond from one piece of the kit to the next piece of the same kit.

I got myself a set of bullet connectors to make it easy to wire some less bulky, aftermarket turn signals.

After that you can run your wiring harness how the original one was run under the fender, and put everything back together again.

The finished product

Once installed, the Motone Miller Light Bracket and Black STOP Light kit looks good. Mostly. Over the winter I’ll remove it, take the bracket to a custom shop, and have them cut it down in width.

Hideously long bracket aside, the rest of it just looks beautiful. Sure the faux chrome plastic “STOP” might look cheesy to some, but I think it adds a little bit of vintage charm. This kit lets you keep that beautiful steel rear fender, but get rid of the massive rear brake mount that Triumph’s designers never should have released it with in the first place.

Please let me know if you like the way it came out. I’d love to hear what you have to say. Thanks for reading along and/or watching!

PS: I have lots of other Bonneville content, including a before and after comparison of the Bonneville Tail Tidy. I have a five step instructional on How To Change Oil on a Triumph Bonneville as per Triumph’s factory service manual. Lastly, I also have a before and after comparison of the Triumph TORS slip on exhausts where you can really hear the difference they make.