HID vs. Auxilliary lighting

[r12gecko]

Anyone done high intensity discharge (HID) lighting for the R1200R?

What's your opinion of auxiliary lighting vs. HID - if you had to pick, would you do HID or Aux lights?

Which Aux or HID would you install?

[deilenberger]

A lot of us have done auxiliary lighting, and some people have done auxiliary HID lighting. What I used can be seen at: http://www.eilenberger.net/R1200R_Roads ... lights.htm - and a number of people copied that setup (but PLEASE mount the lights under the brackets.. - the photos there should really be updated.)

The problem I have with a retrofit HID setup in the stock headlight is the reflector isn't made for the HID light source and that may well cause glare to oncoming traffic. You also could only really use an HID on the low beam (which is always on) since the HID has a warmup time delay before coming to full brightness, that would be annoying at best and dangerous at worst on the high-beam.

The other plus of auxiliary lighting - it provides redundancy if something goes wrong with the main lights (not that I've heard something going wrong with them..) There also aren't a lot of spots to hide the HID ballasts on an R12R making the installation problematical.

I believe one person has done an HID conversion - perhaps they can address how it's working out, and where they mounted the ballast.

Oh, one other comment - in a night time lighting shootout between the Hella FF50's and two different aftermarket HID setups some local club members have installed (one BMW setup sold for the GS, the other a dual HID auxiliary light setup on a K75 that is heavily used by an extreme ironbutt rider friend) - the Hella lights were brighter and provided a better and more useable pattern.

[ShinySideUp]

I chose to go with aux. lights to create more daytime visibility from the resulting triangle of three light sources, as well as more useful light on the ground at night.

But I also wanted to get the most light per watt of juice used and so went with converting Hella FF50's to HID. Having removed the stock horn, I tucked one ballast on each side in the space next to the inside of the gas tank.

These provide a Hella lot of light (sorry), and draw only 35 watts, IIRC.

I don't have them switched, so they're on all the time, once the bike has started. Even though they've run constantly over the last 35K miles, I've just recently had each bulb burn out (within 3 months of each other) and found replacements on eBay for about $18 each.

You can go here and scroll through the next 3 images to see the installation:

http://tinyurl.com/6pb22q

[r12gecko]

Thanks for the tips. I'll probably go aux as I'm getting more & more annoyed with converted cars emitting their blinding rays of blue-white light.