Let there be Light II !

Today was the day that I was going to wrap up the driving light install on my bike. I've been tinkering with this for probably 6 months and still haven't gotten anywhere (as usual). I know I know, you're probably thinking that six months to put in lights is a long time. Well, it is but you would be surprised at how fast it goes. Especially when you are like me and are always hunting and shopping for a better way to do things.

I've already upgraded both my low beam and my high beam from the stock 55W bulb to some Osram 65W bulbs . I saw these bulbs for the firs time at the Hiawatha rally this year on a friends bike and thought they were HID's when he first pulled up. I had been tossing around HID's but decided I wanted to maintain some lights in a more or less stock form in case my other lights went south on me.

I already had a set of Phillips HID lights that I had taken off my 1150GS so the plan was to install them since I REALLY like the amount of light they put out. The part that I had been tossing around was where to mount the ballasts. I'd seen them mounted over the stock headlight and thought about that. Then I saw this cool ballast mount from Europe that attaches to the oil cooler bolt and tried that but didn't like how the larger ballasts of the Phillips fit and caused the oil cooler to flex.

Next I moved on to fabricating a bracket like I did on my 1150 which would require drilling some holes in the front of the beak to provide a little more rigid mount. And as usual I changed my mind once I started sizing up where I would have to drill the holes to give me the support I wanted to have.

So once again I scrapped that plan and moved on to plan C. This time I thought about mounting the ballasts right to the engine guards and driving light bar that came stock on my GS. The plan was to use some clamps similar to the ones used on some of the GS skid plates I've seen IF they came in the right size. So I think this was trip 15 to the hardware store and my chin damn near hit the ground when I saw that they had both sizes I wanted. I guess "Third time Lucky" was true in my case so I grabbed my mounts and my usual assortment of stainless steel hardware and headed home.

Using some scrap aluminum I cut some pieces that I could use to bolt the ballasts to. These pieces would then be bolted to the clamp brackets that I found at the hardware store to secure them to the underside of the front fender.

When all was said and done this location ended up a LOT better than I had anticipated and the ballasts are a lot more stable than I would have had in any of the other ways I had thought of.

Now it was just a matter of bolting up the brackets with the lights to the same spot as the stock fog lights (Thanks for the idea Rich), connect the wiring, and then connect the dreaded BMW switch to the lights. The reason I say the "dreaded" switch was that up until now, nobody I asked knew how to get this blasted thing hooked up so the LED would come on when the lights were on and then turn off when the lights were off. People either had no LED or a LED all the time.

I started off with a cheap (anythings cheap compared to the $70 price tag of the BMW switch) switch and made sure all of my other wiring and soldering was good. Once that all checked out I moved to the BMW switch and sure enough, either I had no light or the LED was on all the time.

I'm a little too anal to wire up the switch knowing it wasn't right so I put the multimeter down, gritted my teeth, and started trying some other combinations of connections. Somehow I managed to find the combination that worked and that stupid little LED came on when the lights were on and turned off when the lights were off. HOT DAMN, I grabbed the soldering gun, finalized the wiring and called it a day.

Here are some shots of the front after mounting and then again with all the lights turned on.