• 4 Stroke Husqvarna Motorcycles Made In Italy - About 1989 to 2014
     TE = 4st Enduro & TC = 4st Cross

  • Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

I love the LED age.

Dirtdame

Dirtdame

Administrator
Staff member
I always hated the headlight on my 2007 Husqvarna TE 450. It was so dim, and so hard to find any decent replacement bulb for. I put in a 45 watt bulb. The extra ten watts was enough to melt a spot on the lens, but didn't really make any noticeable difference in overall brightness. Any brighter option seemed to involve a different base style, and adding more power to the generator to run the brighter light. All of it seemed to cost a fair bit of money, which I didn't want to part with, since I don't often ride at night.

Then....along came LED technology and E-bay. Viola! For a mere $13.86, I now have a much brighter and cooler running light that merely plugged into the existing base and housing on my bike!
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How many watts is that? I can't find that thing on Ebay. I see 80W lights but I'm wondering if that's pulling too much power. I'm an electrical idiot. That's why I haven't pulled the trigger on one yet.
 
MFGamesta said:
How many watts is that? I can't find that thing on Ebay. I see 80W lights but I'm wondering if that's pulling too much power. I'm an electrical idiot. That's why I haven't pulled the trigger on one yet.
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It is an 80 watt light, but it won't be pulling anything near 80 watts from your generator. That's part of the beauty of it. It probably pulls less watts than the stock bulb. This is the one I got, although the price has jumped up a little bit since I bought mine.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/16-CREE-XBD...896702?hash=item25acccdbbe:g:nscAAOSwgQ9V5YhR
 
The 80 Watts would be a equivalent light output. The LED lights use only a fraction of the power to produce the same amount of light power (lumens) as a filament type light. Thanks for the link, I'm going give that a try.:cheers:
 
Dirtdame said:
It is an 80 watt light, but it won't be pulling anything near 80 watts from your generator. That's part of the beauty of it. It probably pulls less watts than the stock bulb. This is the one I got, although the price has jumped up a little bit since I bought mine.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/16-CREE-XBD...896702?hash=item25acccdbbe:g:nscAAOSwgQ9V5YhR
Click to expand...
This is great! I'd been looking for a bulb like this for my 09 wr250 and gave up. I took the worthless headlight off 2 years ago and replaced it with a front number plate, now I can put it back on and use it.
 
Thanks for sharing. I have the same problem with my TE310. The head light is just too dim. I don't ride at night much, but it's so bad that I ride close to other cars to use their lights at night.
I was actually looking at getting the trail tech x2, but I decided to get these auxiliary lights from Bean LED. They were half the price of the Rigid Dually's you see online. They are extremely bright and probably are not street legal. I had a great time cruising through the neighborhood on Halloween with these lights on.
http://www.beanledindustries.com

The mounts that came with them were cheap and thin. One of them rattled and broke off my first desert ride.
I had to get some thicker brackets like these from Twisted Throttle which are a lot thicker.
http://www.twistedthrottle.com/twisted-throttle-l-bracket-2-5-inch-black

The on/off switch that came with it is fine for mounting in a car, but not a bike.

I might just remove these and put one of those ebay LED's you found.


FullSizeRender-2.jpg

Even my iPhone got sun spots.


FullSizeRender.jpg
 
Dirtdame,

Thanks for posting your results with the LED bulb.

I have a couple of questions:

Are you guys running these straight off the battery using regulated DC type power. Or in the case of the headlight did you simply plug it into the existing stock wiring for the headlight which I think is AC?

Does the light in the headlight shell remain on if ignition is on but the engine is off?? or does the light only come on if the bike is running?

I thought LED's did not take well to AC type power???

Thanks,

Bugs
 
I'm running on AC. I put a 6 volt LED tail light on my 1986 KDX 200, and that 30 watt AC generator runs the tail light quite well. The bike was originally wired to run only the 23 watt headlight and the 3 watt tail light, but when I made the bike street legal and added in a 23 watt brake light, things went bad in a hurry. The generator couldn't handle the almost double load, so if I was running the lights and then hit the rear brake, ALL the lighting went out. I had been thinking about shelling out the dough to change the bike to 12 volt and a higher wattage output, but found this 6 volt LED brake/tail light bulb on E-bay. Much cheaper than a 12 volt conversion, and all the lights now work great!
 
It is actually 80W. That is not a lumens our output rating it is a draw rating. It will also only work on DC current. I work at Trail Tech now and have learned a lot about lights and technology around them. That bulb has 16 5-watt cree brand LED units in it. 16x5w=80 watts draw.

there is no such thing as LED 80watts and say halogen 80 watts. Its the same analogy as a 100 pounds of led or a 100 pounds of feathers.

Additionally LED lights not able to be dimmed. So if you don't have enough wattage it will not run it. They do have a 9-16 volt range so per the math equation for watts/amps/voltage it might run on less than 80watts as the math can convert voltage and amperage to be less than 12 volts and it would run at the threshold of 9 volts and still come on.

The bottom line is that bulb needs 80 watts / and no less than 9 volts. This is a rating regardless of technology.

HID lights are actually more efficient than LED at providing light.

The other factor here is reflectors are a huge part of the usable light. The are designed for a point in space where the original bulb was emitting light. That replacement is not optimal because of they way the elements are arrayed around the bulb. They did this to try and replicate the stock bulb. In these kinds of installs you usually get a way brighter looking light when you look into it but the pattern is much more disbursed and less usable than the stock design.

All that said I am not saying what your doing is not providing more light. The stock lights are horrible and 35 watts so you are for sure going to see gains as you are more than doubling the wattage. What I am saying is a say a 60 watt LED bulb with a purposed designed reflector for that light source would be way brighter and more usable.

I've learned a ton about lights here. Fun stuff.
 
Dirtdame said:
I'm running on AC.
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An LED is a diode, but with a very low max reverse voltage, so it should never be used in the reverse bias state (AC). Some will run on AC because they incorporate a capacitor to remove the alternating back current and in effect are really blinking on and off but so fast you probably cant see it. I'm almost positive that bulb you show has a capacitor and resistor in the design and is only using half the cycle and as such half the power.
 
Motosportz said:
Additionally LED lights not able to be dimmed.
Click to expand...



While true they cannot be dimmed by lowering/raising input voltage, leds are dimmable via another method which is pulse width modulation. Basically it pulses the led on/off. Longer the off time, dimmer the led appears.

This is why led lights in video flicker as the frame rates line up with the pwm pulses occasionally.
 
We (Trail Tech) make this light. It is 30/15 watts (3 / 10 watt LED elements) and has amazing amount of usable light. Its a flame thrower. I mounted 2 of them on my Buell and it is amazing. LEDs are very cool but need the right implantation to get the most out of them which is why you see the good ones are expensive.

70mm.png
 
gots_a_sol said:
While true they cannot be dimmed by lowering/raising input voltage, leds are dimmable via another method which is pulse width modulation. Basically it pulses the led on/off. Longer the off time, dimmer the led appears.

This is why led lights in video flicker as the frame rates line up with the pwm pulses occasionally.
Click to expand...


Yes.
 
I have a really hard time believing that a motorcycle headlamp has an actual rating of 80 Watts and a stock electrical system could deliver it without going up in smoke. I have LED flood lamps in my kitchen using 8 Watts. But I have not scene one of these myself. The system does not have to have 80 Watts. Watts is a function of supplied voltage multiplied by current drawn by the load. Voltage times Amperage equals Wattage. So if it has a operating range of 9-16 volts it would work so long as the system can provide enough current. As you said diodes operate on DC, not AC. A bridge rectifier is all that is needed to get both pulses of the sine wave going in the same direction (polarity).
 
PowerKord said:
I have a really hard time believing that a motorcycle headlamp has an actual rating of 80 Watts and a stock electrical system could deliver it without going up in smoke.
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The manufacture posted the 80 watts and it looks like it has 16 5 watt cree brand LEDs so it all adds up. A high draw will not smoke a system, it is regulated and will only deliver what it will deliver.
 
OK I looked up the bulb on ebay and I'm calling BS on the "80 Watts". The other info given is 10 Volts to 30 Volts and .9 amps. That gives a wattage range of 9 to 27 Watts, which seems much more realistic to me.
 
Yea, 80 watts is a bit of a stretch.

The ad says Cree XB-D chips which are rated at 3w max (x16 for 48w max). They are probably only driven at 1/3 of that.
 
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