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So, after a little highway trek at night on the TW200 last weekend I felt that the headlight was lacking. It was aimed correctly but once I met oncoming traffic my usable visibility shrank to near zilch. Compared to my sport bike I was somewhat surprised, and alarmed. I try not to out ride my headlight and look down to the right as typical however it was becoming increasingly frustrating. I did a little research trying to find out what would be the brightest bulb without going over 60/55w. I ended up ordering a Philips X-TremeVision from some place in Europe which ended up being cheaper than locally (as strange as it sounds). They threw in some indicator bulbs, although I had to wait a few days for delivery. From my understanding this bulb will be more prone to dying than a typical motorbike bulb for a few reasons, so I'm packing the old one as a spare at all times.
My goal today was to figure out how I can get the most usable light out of the stock fixture using the bulb above. When I took apart the fixture I noticed something very strange which I ran into with a previous car, for some reason the headlight wire appears to be 18awg or maybe thinner. The wire itself appears to be decent quality copper however quite thin. I imagine it can handle the current fine however with noticeable voltage drop. So, I measured the voltage comparing at the battery and the headlight and noticed it going from 12.08V to 11.00V, a 1.08V difference or as 20.6% power loss. .84V from the positive side to the low beam, and .24 from ground. (Note, my battery isn't fully charged whenever I'm doing this, as I am draining it slowly). Also, the light coming out from this new bulb didn't appear to be much whiter than the one already in there.
I decided I should run a parallel circuit with lower gauge wire. At first I grabbed the thickest stuff I had that was unused, it was 10awg that I had set aside to re-wire a fuel pump for the same reasons but never got around to it and have since sold the car. So after running it through and starting to pull the headlight connector apart it seemed a little silly trying to jam that thick of a wire in there. So I next found 12awg, and started to hook it up and figured the same thing, then I settled on 14awg for the majority of the run.
I ended up using two standard 40A automotive relays from our equivalent of Radio Shack (The Source) since they were open and convenient, and a bunch of crimp on connectors from Canadian Tire, and an inline fuse holder with 12awg wire and a 10A motorcycle fuse. I located the fuse immediately after the battery then ran the 14AWG wire to the front of the bike. I split the positive off using 16awg to the relays, and from the relays to the bulb. I split the ground to the trigger side of the relays using 12 awg which was massively overkill but it was the only black I had handy. The positive triggers for the relay were just the old wires with new ends crimped on. The main ground was direct from the battery to the headlight socket using 14awg.
After some crimping and soldering (although the heatshrink has yet to be shrunk) I did a quick test. The bulb appears to be whiter although it might be from the placebo effect but the voltage drop has changed significantly. As I have been playing around for awhile, my battery voltage has dropped to 11.88V and my 11.70V across the headlight. So a .18V difference (oddly similar number to before). I believe this translates into a 3.1% power loss. It seems like a decent improvement on paper although I'm not sure how much of that is transferred into usable light. If it ends up being 17% brighter I will be happy although I don't know if I could notice the difference without having another bike side by side. Speaking of which, I can't really take pictures between the two easily. I haven't started the bike up and rode around yet as I still have to take some pictures for this thread and tidy a few things up.
While keeping the stock wires should I ever want to convert it back, the way I wired it is using the old ground and highbeam/lowbeam to each trigger to new relays. I went with this setup where the relays are separate for each beam rather than one to trigger the light and the other to trigger which beam. My reason is to reduce the connections between the headlight and the battery to minimize voltage loss and prevent me from getting stuck without a headlight should a relay die or disconnect. If I were to do it again I would just use high quality 16awg wire throughout rather than the cheap non-coppery wire I did end up using (although its nicely coated in high temperature silicone). The headlight connector is a bit of a pain to pull apart, I'm not sure where one would easily source replacement terminals should they get broken in the process, my only suggestion is to slide a very thin flathead screwdriver from the headlight side along the flat edge side of the terminal and press firmly. I used a very small awl-like tool and quite a lot of patience to uncrimp the terminal. They are quite flexible and may break easy.
I noticed I'm too tired to word things cleanly, so I will tidy this up tomorrow with pictures and a bit of a re-write with hopefully fewer words. So far I'm feeling positive about this but I have yet to even fire up the bike.
My goal today was to figure out how I can get the most usable light out of the stock fixture using the bulb above. When I took apart the fixture I noticed something very strange which I ran into with a previous car, for some reason the headlight wire appears to be 18awg or maybe thinner. The wire itself appears to be decent quality copper however quite thin. I imagine it can handle the current fine however with noticeable voltage drop. So, I measured the voltage comparing at the battery and the headlight and noticed it going from 12.08V to 11.00V, a 1.08V difference or as 20.6% power loss. .84V from the positive side to the low beam, and .24 from ground. (Note, my battery isn't fully charged whenever I'm doing this, as I am draining it slowly). Also, the light coming out from this new bulb didn't appear to be much whiter than the one already in there.
I decided I should run a parallel circuit with lower gauge wire. At first I grabbed the thickest stuff I had that was unused, it was 10awg that I had set aside to re-wire a fuel pump for the same reasons but never got around to it and have since sold the car. So after running it through and starting to pull the headlight connector apart it seemed a little silly trying to jam that thick of a wire in there. So I next found 12awg, and started to hook it up and figured the same thing, then I settled on 14awg for the majority of the run.
I ended up using two standard 40A automotive relays from our equivalent of Radio Shack (The Source) since they were open and convenient, and a bunch of crimp on connectors from Canadian Tire, and an inline fuse holder with 12awg wire and a 10A motorcycle fuse. I located the fuse immediately after the battery then ran the 14AWG wire to the front of the bike. I split the positive off using 16awg to the relays, and from the relays to the bulb. I split the ground to the trigger side of the relays using 12 awg which was massively overkill but it was the only black I had handy. The positive triggers for the relay were just the old wires with new ends crimped on. The main ground was direct from the battery to the headlight socket using 14awg.
After some crimping and soldering (although the heatshrink has yet to be shrunk) I did a quick test. The bulb appears to be whiter although it might be from the placebo effect but the voltage drop has changed significantly. As I have been playing around for awhile, my battery voltage has dropped to 11.88V and my 11.70V across the headlight. So a .18V difference (oddly similar number to before). I believe this translates into a 3.1% power loss. It seems like a decent improvement on paper although I'm not sure how much of that is transferred into usable light. If it ends up being 17% brighter I will be happy although I don't know if I could notice the difference without having another bike side by side. Speaking of which, I can't really take pictures between the two easily. I haven't started the bike up and rode around yet as I still have to take some pictures for this thread and tidy a few things up.
While keeping the stock wires should I ever want to convert it back, the way I wired it is using the old ground and highbeam/lowbeam to each trigger to new relays. I went with this setup where the relays are separate for each beam rather than one to trigger the light and the other to trigger which beam. My reason is to reduce the connections between the headlight and the battery to minimize voltage loss and prevent me from getting stuck without a headlight should a relay die or disconnect. If I were to do it again I would just use high quality 16awg wire throughout rather than the cheap non-coppery wire I did end up using (although its nicely coated in high temperature silicone). The headlight connector is a bit of a pain to pull apart, I'm not sure where one would easily source replacement terminals should they get broken in the process, my only suggestion is to slide a very thin flathead screwdriver from the headlight side along the flat edge side of the terminal and press firmly. I used a very small awl-like tool and quite a lot of patience to uncrimp the terminal. They are quite flexible and may break easy.
I noticed I'm too tired to word things cleanly, so I will tidy this up tomorrow with pictures and a bit of a re-write with hopefully fewer words. So far I'm feeling positive about this but I have yet to even fire up the bike.
