LED Headlight Replacement
/I'm not bright enough on the road. Its becoming more obvious to me this winter as its dark out early, and because my friend Yoshi has an R1200GSA with LED headlight and aux lights, he's bright as hell on the road and i want that. It feels like a safety issue. Starting with some research on advrider forums, i found a decently price H7 bulb that looks to be be watertight, at $40. Use "inmate" for a 10% discount code. Both bulbs recommended to me are too big for the housing on my F700GS. Seems to be an issue with all LED replacements of good quality as they need a heat sink.
AdvMonster has a good blog post showing how one of their customers cut out their housing to fit the LED. I did something very similar, but less elegant.
I pulled out the old bulb, put the new one in. I realized that the new bulb has a small metal grommet that can attach in place, having the stock bmw clasps hold it in place, and then you can actually twist the LED out of that separately. So with the little metal grommet in place, i removed the LED module and brought it upstairs with me along with the light housing rear cap to do some cutting.
I used a dremel and sawed out a not so smooth circle slightly bigger then the LED module. I then went back down to reinsert the LED module, and fit the cap over. I will need to return to it with some caulking of some sort to make it more water tight.
After riding with it for a week, i don't have such a good feel for the distance improvements. Being in NYC is already a bright place. I'll need to get some country riding in to really know. But i do know that I'm a whiter more obvious light. For $40 and 20 minutes of installation I think its well worth it. That was for my low beam only. I've decided ill order another one for my high beam. Its worth it.
After all that, ill have to save up for some good LED Aux Lights. I feel that will be the biggest upgrade in terms of visibility and longer distance light coverage on the road out ahead of me.
