An auxiliary light question

[Fred W]

It's interesting, but I don't believe I've EVER heard someone mention, much less install, an HID low-beam conversion in one headlight bucket and a high-beam HID in the other bucket, wired w/relay so both High and Low were on in the High Beam "On" switch position.
Any good reason why no one's done, or even mentioned this before???

I would think this would be the cat's-ass-solution for someone (like me) who didn't want a set of gargantutoid aux lights hanging off their fairings.

It's definitely been discussed and done, in different flavors, before. One "problem" with going with a dedicated high beam and a dedicated low beam is that you lose some of the desireable lighting output in the low beam position.

I personally have tried another of the permutations of that. I tried a telescopic HID in the left headlight and a low beam only "fixed" HID in the right one. The reason for doing that rather than just using 2 telescopics is that with 2 High beams, the cutoff at the lower edge of the beam is so sharp that you lose all foreground lighting.

see here:link to my beam patterns

The mixed set-up was a very viable solution and I could have lived with it. But one of the primary drivers behind my wanting the HID headlights was I wanted to have some ass burning High beams to drive around with during daylight hours to increase my odds of not getting hit by one of the BDBH (Brain Dead BoogerHead) cagers around here. So I subsequently went back to dual telescopics with a set of low beam aimed fill lights as auxillaries.

[edit] Here is the link to the dedicated High/ dedicated Low set up. linky

[edit]

And here is the correct way to do it (for people with unlimited funds) Linkage

 

[OGRE]

I understand that 55 watt bulbs are not street legal..... but does anyone know if there are any issues with mounting them... I.E. melted reflectors, lenses, mounts, overheated wiring harness? Ummm this is a strictly hypothetical question since I, would never put "race only parts" in my bike LOL. :dribble: It seems to me that if they were adjusted properly, there wouldn't be a problem with blinding oncoming traffic. Just a thought.

 

[Fred W]

I understand that 55 watt bulbs are not street legal..... but does anyone know if there are any issues with mounting them... I.E. melted reflectors, lenses, mounts, overheated wiring harness? Ummm this is a strictly hypothetical question since I, would never put "race only parts" in my bike LOL. :dribble: It seems to me that if they were adjusted properly, there wouldn't be a problem with blinding oncoming traffic. Just a thought.

We have 55/50W bulbs in the headlamps now. 50W on low beam, 55W on high. What may not be legal are the higher wattage ones. 90/100W, etc. But technically, the HID retrofits we do probably aren't 100% kosher either. Most of those laws were intended to keep people from dazzling oncoming traffic by being brighter than the other vehicles. That pretty much went out the window with the now common use of HID lighting. So, yes, as long as they were properly aimed you'd probably be OK with halogens that were brighter.

But you really don't want the higher wattage lamps. For one thing, the gain in light intensity is not directly proportional to increase in wattage. So you don't get twice the light down the road. You'll be sucking twice the power out of the poor little FJR alternator which will pretty much use up all available power on a 1st gem, and disallow using any heated gear at all on a 2nd.

And the entire electrical wiring harness was speced out to support the stock headlights current draw. They don't put wires in any larger than what are needed as it would just be a waste of money. You don't want to over heat that wiring so you'd need to install a new headlight relay with larger gauge wires, like is commonly done for installing aux lights, directly from the battery to the headlights.

And yes, the plastic headlamp bucket could very well distort if you use the 100W bulbs for any length of time in warm weather. Then you'll be in for some really big expense. $$$ I did this myself on an aftermarket BMW automobile headlamp assembly. I put 100W high beam H1 halogen bulbs in a set of projector beam headlamps and the plastic reflector began to distort. :angry:

When you start to look at this as a whole you will be further ahead in the long run adding aux lights or converting to HIDs.

 

[bramfrank]

As things presently stand, HID conversions work well only for low beams - and even then you need to be careful. Chinese ballasts tend to have much shorter lives than quality ones so those $50 kits are pretty lame -

The reflector on our bikes was never intended for HIDs, so, auxiliary driving lights are likely to serve you and oncmoing traffic much better.

Indeed, HID conversions are not legal. Neither are 'eye of god' replacement headlight bulbs, not to mention they place a strain on the bike's wiring, which is not optimal.

 

[iCruze]

Thinking about mounting one of these 8" light bars above the front tire on my black bird alah knight rider

https://www.visionxoffroad.com/led/xmitter/