LED bulb problem - CB77
Seadog, glad we could help. Don't be embarrassed about dumb mistakes. If it weren't for mistakes, we would have no need to learn and question, and there wouldn't be great head scratching threads like this one. Thanks for sharing this upgrade and its shortcomings with us and take comfort in knowing others will follow and be just a little wiser before trying it themselves.
"If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy." Red Green
Seadog, I tried the same Cree bulb that you have been trying, and in my opinion it was not usable for night driving. I gave up and bought a new sealed unit (34W) which was better than the old sealed unit that I had cut up to put the Cree bulb in. I was still not satisfied, so I continued to search and found this one on ebay:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Super-Bright-Wh ... dp&vxp=mtr I cleaned up the spot where I had soldered the Cree mount and installed this one with JBweld. The claim on the website was that this bulb used 24W in high beam, 18W low. This bulb rocks, it is as bright as the headlights on my BMW and Ducati. I put a voltmeter on the bike and took baseline voltages for high and low beam on the sealed beam, and compared with the LED bulb, the bike was able to get to higher voltage output with the LED bulb - with a MUCH brighter light. While I have not used it long at all, so I don't know it's longevity, I have LED bulbs on the taillight and license plate lights that have been working fine for the last year, on all the time. I'm not overrunning my headlight anymore, even at higher speeds! As far as the 12V regulator, I also recommend something I learned on another forum (may have made it's way to this one), I replaced the old orange rectifier with a regulator rectifier from a Kohler lawn tractor. You can pick them up on ebay for about 25 bucks: http://www.ebay.com/itm/VOLTAGE-REGULAT ... rt=nc#rwid They are easy to install on the old rectifier bracket, they work great and you get lots of charging, light on or off. You combine the pink and yellow alternator outputs so you get the full charging capability at all times (not just when the lights are on). Plug the combined output into one of the AC terminals, the remaining brown wire from the alternator in the other AC labeled terminal, and the terminal labeled B+ is the positive output to the battery. Cheap, easy and works great - I've installed these things in a number of old bikes, including my Hawk, my old Dream a CL350 and a CL175, all still going with other owners. Sorry I don't have any pictures, but if there's interest Ill open things up and get some shots. Good luck, and be careful riding at night if you leave that Cree in there! Thanks for your very informative post and links, aerojack. Most appreciated.
When I installed the Cree bulb, I quickly noticed that it was not nearly as bright as the incandescent bulb that I'd installed earlier. That's a concern, even though my main reason for using the LED was for visibility & safety while day riding without overstraining the charging system. I'm not sure that the Cree would even pass my state's yearly safety inspection. I'll likely try the bulb you suggested, although I'm not certain that the larger back end will fit into the headlight bucket, given the way I've already mounted the H4 bulb socket onto the back of the lamp. It's worth a shot though. The Kohler regulator/rectifier you suggested is a great idea. Thanks for that and the info on wiring it. I've ordered one using the link you provided. Sounds easy enough to install; I'm guessing that you used the existing wiring with some modification and didn't run a new sub-wiring harness. I'd would like to see how you mounted it into the existing rectifier bracket though, if you ever have the opportunity to post a photo or two. Thanks again.
Seadog,
I've been trying to attach some pics of the headlight and rectifier/regulator installation for a couple days now, but for some reason, I've gotten consistent "Upload errors" while trying on three different computers, two operating systems (windows 7 and 10) and two different browsers. I've even tried pictures that I've uploaded to this forum before, so I dont know what I'm doing wrong - the process has always been straight forward in the past. Any suggestions from anyone would be appreciated! I'll see if I can send the pics to you via PM. Here's the message that I've tried to send about 4 times now! Seadog, I've attached some pics of the headlight installation (not yet!), it seems to work fine, I just took it out for a night ride, I think I'll need to re-aim the light, the high beam puts more light down low. This may be the failing of this light, its a triangular configuration, I'm not sure if I have the bulb mounted upside down or right side up (I guess I can try rotating the headlight in the trim ring, since I glued it in!). I did make sure that the orientation was parallel to the glass lines on the headlight glass, but as you'd guess, there's absolutely no directions with the one I got. Anyway, I'll post what I find out. I just noticed that the Cree bulb you list says it's 80W. If that's true, you probably don't want to leave that on while you ride, you'll run your battery down in short order. The bike will barely charge with the standard 34W incandescent bulb, anything much more than that will discharge the battery (my installation of a 50W halogen bulb proved to be too much for my shrging system). You may want to try hooking up a volt meter to your battery terminals while you rev and idle the engine. If the volts on the battery will not hold more than 12 volts (12.5 is probably a minimum) when revving the engine at about 4000 RPM, then the bulb may be too much for the charging system. I've also attached some pics of the regulator/rectifier installation. The first pic is the splicing of the pink and yellow lines into a single AC line, note the brown line there as well. The next picture shows the now yellow line and the brown line plugged into the R/R, with the red output line in-between them. The last pic hopefully shows how I bent the old orange rectifier's mount to bolt the new R/R in it's place. Hopefully this helps, let me know if you need anything else. Regards, Jack
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