So - I set out to duplicate the performance of the FF50's on the new bike. The simplest way would have been to order new FF50's and new LumaLinks, but I was looking for a different look, so..
First try was MotoBozzo lights from Germany. These mount to the tank, on the bottom of the front tank mount (where there is an empty hole.) The bracket is beautifully made and it comes with a custom wiring harness - made to fit the R1200R. The light used is the "MicroFlooder" which Wunderlich sells without a bracket. Cost was about $165 for the kit.
(From the MotoBozzo website)
I installed this kit - which revealed problems with it. The lights would be fine for conspicuity - they are quite visible in bright sunlight, but they were not great for night use. The reasons were several: 1 - they are located behind the fork legs, and when on they light up the backside of the fork legs and fork tubes brightly. This is bad for night vision. 2 - Being behind the fork legs also cut off a lot of the light toward the center of the bike. It was almost impossible to get a well centered light pattern using these lights. 3 - The MotoBozzo "switch" (I believe it's actually an AutoSwitch - made in the US) was tied to the high-beam switch. Two flashes of the high-beam switch for on, two flashes for off. The problem here is that triggered the programming mode of my headlight modulator - which uses 3 flashes to adjust the light sensitivity setting. I kept having problems with the modulator being reprogrammed. I eventually removed the AutoSwitch and put in a PIAA switch that worked directly with the light relay, solving that problem. 4 - Current draw. These were ordered with the high-output bulbs, which are 55W - 55W x 2 = 110W, and combine that with heated gear, the high-beam and low-beam on and a heated seat pad and you are coming close to the excess capacity of the alternator, meaning using them all at once could result in discharging the battery.
So - I started looking for a better solution - preferably LED based to lessen the current draw.
There are LOTS of LED auxiliary lights on the market, from cheap Chinese ones to expensive US made ones. The vast majority of them are IMHO - crap. I have a background in physics - studying the properties of light - so driving lights have always been sort of a hobby for me. The majority of LED lights on the market are what can be called point-source lights. They have LEDs facing out and use minimal to no beam shaping to create a useful pattern of light. This happens with the cheap ones, and the horribly expensive ones that you'll see on dealer displays. That sort of source is OK if you're looking for a LOT of light - in sort of a blob pattern. You can easily determine this by looking at the lights - if you look at them off-axis by about 30 degrees or so - and they are blinding - they are putting out a blob of light. You can also hold a piece of paper in front of them and see the pattern (or lack of pattern.) To make them sort of useful the manufacturers keep adding more LEDs to the lights - making the blob brighter, but no less of a blob.
What's bad about this? You have light where you don't want it. For night use of driving lights you do NOT want light to fall close to the bike. You do not want it lighting up trees overhead. You really don't want it lighting up the woods next to the bike as you ride. Why? Because your eye reacts to the brightest source of light and attempts to compensate for it's brightness. The bright light close to your bike destroys your night vision - your iris closes and the rods in your eye retract. That means that your vision outside the reach of the blob of light is greatly reduced. Plus - the forward facing blob of light is certain to blind oncoming traffic - so you have to switch it off. Problem here is it takes some time for your eye to adjust again for normal night-vision, so you're actually somewhat blinded when you switch the light off.
So - what was I looking for? An LED light that shapes the beam, and doesn't have a forward facing LED point-source.
This is actually rather rare in LED lights - I finally tracked down a new PIAA design that uses a "reflector facing" LED source, and uses the reflector to shape the beam. They have several models available in this design, but the best one to fit on the R12R appeared to be the smallest the LP-270.
LINK to PIAA Site: http://www.piaa.com/store/c/4110-LP-Ser ... Lamps.aspx
LINK to PIAA Site: http://www.piaa.com/store/p/648-LP270-2 ... liant.aspx
List price is $350. I found a deal using Amazon Prime for less then $200 ($196.) It includes a complete wiring harness, and some hardware plus an allen wrench to fit the adjusting screws.
So I ordered them, they arrived and I was impressed with the construction - well designed, and excellent weather sealing. They feel and look like a high-quality item. Hooking them up to a battery in my garage showed them to be VERY bright, but with a tightly shaped pattern - just like I was looking for (basically a flat horizontal pattern that doesn't diverge too rapidly - PIAA said they have a 30 degree divergence, which looking at them I would find no reason to doubt.) There is almost no light thrown out above or below the pattern, meaning they won't be lighting up extraneous parts of the landscape, and can probably be used (correctly aimed) with at least some oncoming traffic.
I'll continue this in the next post - how I mounted them - and the result.
