Led headlamps

[Jim Eh.]

In my mind the safety issue comes when you run with extremely bright lights for an extended period of time then meet oncoming traffic. You reduce to low beams and can't see squat because your eyes are not accustomed to the sudden low(er) light. This reduces your vision just when you need it the most. At a closing speed of 120 M.P.H. (or better) things happen way to quickly.

[chessie4905]

Since they don't give a damn about all the noise from Harleys, they have better things to do than chase down non dot lamps and bulbs. Many leds are rotateable in their sockets and headlamps pa are adjustable, so some effort can applied to make your installation to the other drivers acceptable with a good pattern. For the others, just keep using the old stuff.

[belfert]

My stock lights were horrible.  The voltage was low so I installed an 8 AWG cable direct from the batteries and installed solenoids.  That fixed the voltage drop, but still the lights were bad.

I finally went all out in 2014 and bought Hella 90 MM Bi-Xenon (HID) headlight assemblies.  They were about $1,000 for the pair.  I made my own mounts and carefully aligned them.  They are great!  I never use the high beams as low beam is great.

Hella is a good manufacturer of lighting.  They are DOT approved and are a true projector headlight designed for HID.  They are not a cheap Chinese retrofit for an existing housing.

[richard5933]

One of the reasons stock headlights are often bad when a bus nut gets a bus is that they are decades old. Sealed beam headlights were not designed to last forever and need replacement from time to time.

When I was working through my headlight issues last spring, I realized that the reflectors in my sealed beam headlights had a yellowish tinge to them. When I replaced them with new there was a huge difference in performance even before I did all the other work, and that was just using standard sealed beam headlights from Napa.

[RichardEntrekin]

Brian,

I also retrofitted the Hella HID lights. I had to do a bit of fiberglass and paint work (sarcastic understatement) on the front cap to remove the twin F-150 monsters that were originally fitted and make the little 90mm lights look like they belonged aesthtically.

They are pricey, but wow, they light up the road without blinding the oncoming drivers. They have a VERY sharp cutoff vertically. The sharp cutoff is almost too sharp, in that the one drawback is that they do not cast much light upward to read signs that you are close to.

But that was some 6 years ago. If I were doing it again, I would look for one of the sealed LED units that are made for OTR trucks. There are also some nice sealed units in round configuration made to retrofit in Jeeps. They really put out focused light without unwanted glare. LED lights do not suffer the same issues with voltage drop that Halogen lights do, since LED's really depend much more on amperage than voltage for the light output.

The point of my first reply is don't put LED bulbs or HID retrofits in an existing Halogen housing. Tons of vendors out there promoting and selling that solution without warning to the uninformed. I was trying to provide information so that others could make informed decisions.