Let there be light
One of my main concerns when riding home after work is that the other cars / road users cannot see me when the sun goes down. From personal experience driving and riding, when you are amongst a lot of traffic and there are a lot of shops around, its super easy for a bikes headlights to blend in with the background and not be overly easy to see. So, I decided to to some work on my lights.
My idea being that I dont want to differentiate myself from the other vehicles, I want to differentiate from everything! Including the shops, people, the lot. A lot of guys seem to try to base the lights on the front of their bike on the ‘Triangle of Light’ idea. Basically, because the lights are in a triangle (one light above, two below) it easily distinguishes your bike from other vehicles. I thought I’d so something similar, with a twist.
The bandit has two dim-ish parking lights on each side of the headlight. I replaced these with high powered 6-diode LED’s. I also added a 25-diode LED strip under the headlight. This gives the front of the bike a fairly unique appearance and gives it a bit more light-presence on the road. The strip is wired into the same loom as the parkers as because the parkers have been replaced with LED’s there is far less power drawn so there is ample to supply the additional lights. I also replaced the tail light bulb with a high output LED cluster to make the rear of the bike more obvious. But its still not bright enough for me and I’ll be replacing the whole rear light unit with either a DIY or premade LED unit. I’ll also be replacing the indicators at some stage with high output LED’s too.
Some pics;
Front with no lights on:
Front with new LED parkers and strip (note, the parkers are hard to see in this pic, but they are actually fairly bright)
Rear with the brake off
And, rear with the brakes on
You can see that the replacement of typical filament bulbs with LED’s increases the bikes visibility somewhat. Its still not enough. I need to make sure my bike will be seen fron the ISS.
Also, if you are planning on stealing my bike, take note of the fierce guard dog keeping watch in front of the bike.