Does anyone out there have any experience knowledge of LED headlamps.
I am thinking of retaining the original Bosch bowl and headlamp rim and fitting the LED glass into the rim. the projection on the glass needs to be 180mm. Any ideas guzzi guys?
I tried a few led h4 bulbs in my jap bike off Amazon and they were all terrible, sent them back and went back to bulbs like Phillips nightbreaker and similar.
I’m sure there are good LEDs available, as OEM LEDs are amazing, and I’ve seen older guzzis at club meets with LEDs fitted to old round headlights that looked good. Just be wary of anything you’ve not seen or got a good report on from someone here because the ones I got from Amazon had loads of good (fake?) reviews and were really useless.
I put some LEDs I got off Amazon in the Cibies in the Stelvio. A straight swap for the original bulbs. The more you pay the better. You can see from the Lux or similar rating what power you are getting. There were dozens so I went for the most powerfull. On unlighted roads they were amazing and picked out road traffic signs a mile ahead. This was about 5 years ago and they came with a little black box for each bulk which I cable tied behind the headlight shell. Things moved on and 3 years ago a bought some newer ones for my Suzuki 650 Burgman and these didn’t need an additional black box. The advanatage with the LEDs is that they show up even in bright sunlight. I have never had anyone not see and pull out. I now have a V85TT with sealed LEDs. I wish it handnt as LED improve every year and there are some very powerful ones on Amazon now
I was more thinking of replacing the whole headlamp reflector. The silver reflective surface is corroding? I have spoken with Alchemy parts, they sell the a complete headlamp, which is smaller and wondered if anyone had previously adapted such a thing to fit into the original hedlamp shell?
thank you for the comments so far, I’m going down this road at some point and will let you all know how I got on!
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I have a '78 Ducati with the Bosch headlight and shell. I’ve found a number of difficulties with replacing the lighting.
180mm appears to be a Bosch special size, so finding glass which fits properly appears to be impossible. This I think is the problem you’re currently asking about. A few years ago I took a punt on a replacement rim from Vehicle Wiring Products which looked like it might work. It has the slightly smaller aperture for the glass and appears to be able to fit the shell ok. I’ve not installed it, just done a dry fit of the rim to the shell, but it should allow standard glass to go in.
However, there are a couple of other gotchas you need to check out.
The Bosch shell is quite shallow, so there’s a good chance replacement reflectors may be too deep to fit. Compounding this, they put that connector block in the back which takes up some space, too.
Thank you for your reply, Andy.
I’ll most likely get around to buying a complete LED unit and then seeing if I can adapt it to eventually sit inside the Bosch shell. Or just run with it as it is. The reflectors seem to cost an arm and two legs in contrast to the shells