Installing a TrailTech Striker and LED lights

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alanB

Grey Hound
Joined
Apr 28, 2010
Messages
6,776
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Location
Johannesburg
Bike
Husqvarna (all models)
A week or so ago my HID stopped working again.

I installed the HID a few years ago a couple of months after I first got the bike.  I had a lot of trouble with ballasts at first but Adventurer helped out and eventually one of the replacements he supplied seemed to last.

In the interim, the bulb was taking strain.

I ride mostly off road, in quite technical terrain and the constant vibration, jumps and hammering etc was shaking it all to bits. 

The HID bulb was supposed to move in and out when you select brights or dims, but the vibration was wearing it all loose so you could see it wobbling around inside.  It eventually was flopping around quite badly - I was constantly expecting it to break.  The writing was on the wall because it was getting steadily worse.

Anyway as I said, last week it stopped working again.  But this time it seemed to be due to some bad connection some where because it switched on and off as I fiddled with the wires.

While trying to isolate the fault it seemed that I somehow damaged my instrument display which seemed to have blown something internal.  The instrument display itself had a few issues before that, mostly because it was filling up with dust internally which you could see lying on the display inside. 

oldinstrument.JPG


In addition to all of that, the cable from the speed sensor was very flimsy and kept breaking.

Soooo... given all these little issues I decided to splash out and get new lights as well as a different instrument.

I settled on the new TrailTech Striker mainly because it had the ability to adjust the trip distance up or down via a remote handle bar switch, as well as being quite reasonably priced https://www.trailtech.net/striker.html.

In addition to that it had number of other useful features that my standard instrument panel lacked:
1) Water temp
2) Ambient temp
3) Time
4) Average speed
5) Voltage
6) Stop watch


The bonus was that the kit came with a new speedo cable which apparently fit 100% into the existing fittings at both ends.

The only thing it lacked was a rev display which wasn't a train smash.

I also ordered their clip-on warning light display.  https://trailtech.net/indicator_dashboards.html

It only had provision for 4 warning lights.  It came with a whole lot of little clip in lenses that would show different things.  I chose, low fuel warning, turn indicator, neutral indicator, and bright headlight indicator.  The original Husky instrument also had two more warning lights - rev limiter and headlight indicator.  The headlight indicator was redundant and the rev limiter light was useless because the Striker couldn't measure revs.  But I didn't ride the bike on the rev limiter ever so that didn't bother me.  In any event I doubt if you will be looking down at your instrument cluster as you hit the rev limiter - so I've always wondered about the usefulness of that light.

All told it came to about R1800.00 before shipping and VAT, not too bad. So far so good. 

And then I'm afraid I lost my head. 

I had decided to get a new headlight, because I was sick and tired of constantly wondering whether the HID light would or wouldn't still be working at the end of a ride.

I had seen in the Dakar thread on AdvRider that lots of the guys used LED lights, and had previously looked for the suppliers of those lights out of interest.  Neduro who rode the Dakar the year before last used Rigid Industries lights which I rather liked.  After lots of browsing around I decided that the Dually's looked like a good option, very solid and obviously high quality.  https://www.rigidindustries.com/Dually-LED-Light-Flood-p/dually-fl.htm 

They came in various patterns, spot, flood and diffuse.  One of the reasons why I settled on Rigid Industries is they gave proper believable specs on the light patterns of their lights, unlike most Chineses and other suppliers, who just quoted lumens (with the implication that the more the better, but gave no info on how that light was projected).

I needed to try and reproduce the quite complex light spread of an automotive headlight which had a hard "cut-off" in dim mode that kept the light down on the road and stopped glare blinding on-coming motorists.  I thought I could do this with a combination of one flood pattern light which I could angle, slightly downwards and then have a seperate spot pattern shine off into the distance when on brights.  I wasn't 100% sure that this would work, but was willing to give it a go, so I ordered one of each. 

This started a whole sequence of events that eventually would cost a hell of a lot of money!  :patch: :biggrin:

I thought initially I could get the two lights for the price of a pair which was cheaper, but sadly that was not to be - so that cost an extra $15, no big deal.  At that stage thery were about R1000 each before shipping, which was expensive, but OK given that cheap Chinese units locally went for about R700-800.

The real problem came in that each light was packaged in its own quite big box.

With high shipping costs from the US and the Rand/US exchange rate at an all time high, this ended up doubling the price of the lights once they arrived here - ouch!  Unfortunately I used Bongo to ship all the stuff from the states, and because it was the first time I used them I wasn't completely sure how their system worked, so I had difficulty working out what the shipping costs would be.

Oh well, an expensive lesson!

Anyway it all arrived last week  :thumleft:

 
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