How To: install LED lighting conversion kit

I recently picked up the new and improved version of SpeedMetal’s LED Conversion Kit from Cycle Gear:

This is the "new and improved" version -- so new, in fact, that I cannot yet find it on Cycle Gear's web catalog. It is in stores, however, and (for this month at least) is perpetually on sale.

As you can see, it promises up to 3000 lumens. I assume this is high beam. Standard H4 headlights, for reference, produce 1650 lumens at high beam and only 1000 lumens low beam. Here is what my bike looked like after installing one of these puppies:

The light on your left is the new LED, the light on your right is the old H4 halogen. No comparison, brightness wise. 

While the installation was relatively simple, I wanted to post this how-to because it wasn't quite as simple and plug-and-play-and-go as the box promised. So, here goes:

Step 1: unplug the H4 (or H7 if that's your bike) connector from the back of your headlight. On a semi-faired bike like mine, all of these steps require reaching uncomfortably into the space behind the front cowling and doing a lot of things "by feel" -- hence the poor picture quality, for which I apologize.

Step 2: peel off the rubber moisture seal (I assume most motorcycles have something like this) that goes behind your light bulb.

Step 3: un-secure the clip that holds the light bulb in place and then pull the bulb straight out backwards, being careful not to touch the quartz glass part of the bulb -- if you ever have to use this bulb again, finger oils on the glass will make it burn out much faster.

Step 4: slide the retaining ring off of your shiny new LED lightbulb and clip just the retaining ring onto the headlight fixture where your old bulb used to be.


Step 5: the instructions tell you to just put the old rubber moisture seal back on behind the retaining ring at this point. That might work for your bike, or it might work like it did for mine: using the ring as-is kept the new LED units from locking into place and they fell out the very first time I went riding with them. It turns out that my rubber moisture seal wasn't built to have anything like an LED cooling fixture behind it, and yours may not either. So you might need to...

Trim the rubber moisture seal gasket with your trusty Leatherman-knockoff pen knife until, as in the bottom picture, the rear cooling half of the LED "bulb" fits snugly into the back end of the gasket.

Step 6: once the rubber moisture sealing gasket is back in place, you can simply push the new LED "bulb" through the gasket into the retaining ring you installed earlier. You will know that you trimmed the gasket sufficiently if the LED "bulb" flange sits flush with the retaining ring when looked at from the front.

Step 7a: this is when you pull the electrical converter unit out of the box it came in. On one side of the box is a round plug reminiscent of those old DIN connectors that computers used to use. Line it up with the mating cable that comes out of the back of the LED "bulb" you just installed and plug them together. Then, screw the retainer cap on the female end onto the male end.

Step 7b: on the other side of the electrical converter box is an H4 or H7 plug. Find the headlight plug you disconnected back in step 1 and go ahead and plug it in. Once you have everything connected, you can put the key in your bike and go ahead and turn the headlights on to make sure everything is connected properly. You should see one hell of a bright light coming from the headlight you just installed.

Step 8: find some way to secure the electrical wiring and boxes to the frame of your bike, otherwise those too will bounce all over the place when you first decide to take a ride (not that this happened to me, or anything). In this case, I twist-tied the wires onto my frame in such a way that the converter box is stowed into a nook in the front fairing.


Step 9: check your light focus and aiming. Chances are, the focal point of your new LED "bulb" doesn't exactly match the focal point of your old halogen headlamp and you will need to tweak the aiming screws. If you want a how-to on that let me know in the comments and I will make one. But first, there may be a bigger problem:

As you can see in this picture, the LED lights as installed produce two bright spots on my garage door, not the one bright spot you would expect, and neither one is on the aiming point for the lights.

The problem turns out to be that I installed the lights to look like the halogen bulb I just replaced, with the little metal divider piece aligned horizontally:

When I turned the lights so that they aligned vertically...

Then they produced a nice, even line of light on my garage door that only needed a little bit of aiming-screw adjustment to line up with the aiming lines I had drawn there earlier:

I suppose that the reason why the instructions don't tell you to install these vertically, horizontally, or somewhere in between is that every bike's reflectors are somewhat different. But I would definitely do this garage-door test before trying to ride at night -- I tried riding with them in the horizontal position shown first and was wondering what the hell had happened to all of that bright light!

This is how the lights perform on partially lit and completely unlit streets with totally unreliable exposures from my cell phone camera:

Okay, that's nine steps to better bike lighting. I hope this helps you have less trouble than I had!