The smart way to connect driving lights to a motorcycle

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Sidecar Bob
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The smart way to connect driving lights to a motorcycle

#1

Post by Sidecar Bob »

Several years ago, Peter Hoogeveen wrote an article for Cycle Canada on preparing a bike for the Iron Butt.
In the Iron Butt, you spend a lot of time at high speeds on deserted roads at night, and good lighting is absolutely imperative.
Most bike charging systems (partly due to weight considerations) don't have a lot of excess capacity. Certainly not enough to allow regular use of a pair of 55W halogen driving lights in addition to the original 55W headlight, but most have enough capacity for one extra driving light.

What Peter does is:
- Connect the right hand driving light to the high beam and aim it directly ahead and level so that it increases the high beam's effectiveness.
- Connect the left hand driving light to the low beam and aim it so that it's light hits the shoulder of the road about twice as far away as the low beam hits the road. This allows you to dim your lights for oncoming traffic while still having some of the benefits of the driving light.

The driving lights can be controlled with a double pole single throw (DPST) switch.

I have tried this and it works.

Note: for maximum effectiveness, the driving lights should be mounted as high as possible. The lower they are, the less light will actually project down the road and the more light will merely illuminate the road close to you.
I had the lights on my trike mounted on the front of the fairing, just below the windshield. It made it look kind of like a big frog, but they worked much better than on previous setups where I had lights mounted below the fairing.
Mr. Honda ('83 GL1100/Dnepr) summer How a motorcycle evolves thread
The Famous Eccles ('84 CX650EI/VeloUral) winter Never Ending Build (CX500forum)
Click: Colour schematics for all GL1000 & GL1100 and GL1200 standard models plus instructions on how to download the full size version
"A guy with two sidecars can't be all bad." - Cookie
Another guy with two sidecars..... Hmmmm... must be something to that....
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Sidecar Bob
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Joined: Sun Jun 11, 2006 10:14 pm
Location: Kawartha Lakes, Ontario

Re: The smart way to connect driving lights to a motorcycle

#2

Post by Sidecar Bob »

After I posted the above I found some nice low profile driving lights with 35W H3s and plastic housings and mounted them on a light bar made from a piece of 1/2" square aluminum painted black to match the lights and attached to the lower triple clamp.

The plastic housings mean that the bulbs are completely isolated from ground so that I was able to wire them to a DPDT switch so that when the switch was down they were in series across the low beam and when the switch was up they were connected as described above. The two 35W bulbs in series only consumed 17.5W. Since my front turn signals didn't have running lights this meant that the driving lights only used a bit more than the original equipment most of the time and less than 30W more on the highway at night. The alternator can easily handle that.

I was very happy with this setup when the 'Wing was a solo but when I added the sidecar I changed to a bixenon HID on the bike and a low beam only HID on the sidecar, which lights up the road better than most car headlights.

I decided that I liked the look of the low profile driving lights so I replaced the halogen bulbs with 1W LED H3 replacements and connected them to the left marker light wire so that they turn off when the turn signal is flashing.

Image
Mr. Honda ('83 GL1100/Dnepr) summer How a motorcycle evolves thread
The Famous Eccles ('84 CX650EI/VeloUral) winter Never Ending Build (CX500forum)
Click: Colour schematics for all GL1000 & GL1100 and GL1200 standard models plus instructions on how to download the full size version
"A guy with two sidecars can't be all bad." - Cookie
Another guy with two sidecars..... Hmmmm... must be something to that....
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