Has anyone tried one of these ? http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0094R4KQU/?tag=ducatiforum-21 If so, are they any good ? I was thinking for less than £40 it might be worth a punt...
It will give you a brighter beam,but what our bikes suffer from is,a really poorly designed light reflector,so you will have a much stronger beam that still only lights up exactly the same spread of light as before,I think!If different please let us know.
Sounds fair enough to me ! I have recently changed my car - for an identical one that is newer... The new one has HiD lights and there is a definite difference in the quality of the light, but it doesn't go any further up the road and there is a much more defined "cut off" between the light and dark... Just thought I'd ask, because like I said, for £40 I reckoned it might be worth a punt...
I tried one of these kits from eBay. I did the dip beam first and then the main beam. It is as said, that it doesn't give that much a better a spread, it just intensifies what's there already. That said it is better, but the first ballast pack failed on me within three months and the second within about the same. It's funny, then the seller on eBay suddenly became a lot less responsive. It then turned out that if I sent them back at my own expense they would replace them. It turned out they came from China, not Germany, as was originally stated and would cost as much as the whole kit did in the first place. Feck that! I went back to good quality bulbs, opened up the headlight and cleaned the weird misty deposit that had gathered on the projector lens. Then I took off the cut off hood on the dipped beam, refocused it to compensate and now enjoy a vastly better light spread and quality. That said, we don't have bike MOTs here. But it is still pretty shit compared to my 1991 ZXR750R! It can knock small birds off trees with the main beam at 60mph! A
@ Ascalon - Yes, I have to agree, the ST4 is blessed with pretty rubbish lights ! The headlight on the M600 is WAY better - but then it is big and round like headlights should be, not designed to look good and fit in a fairing... I thought I would ask about the HiD's to see if they are any good. What I should really do is take the headlight to bits and clean it. I will probably bolt a couple of BMW GS style projector fog-lights on to the fairing to get more light - £40 for a pair from Halfords will probably be better than taking a chance on a cheap HiD kit that may or may not work...
Might there be a headlight from a jap bike that fits,I sometimes think a yammy XJ unit might be nearly there,any info out there?
I have a HID kit (cheap ebay one) on my bike. Bought it mainly for daylight viz. No problems so far, almost palpable difference in motorists reaction to seeing me/bike...:smile:
I no longer have the ST4s but one of the first mods I did was to fit HID to the dip beam. The pattern was still rubbish but at least it was brighter. :smile: One of the problems I found with OEM headlight was that when the dip beam was adjusted for the correct height the main beam was too high and not lighting up the road for maximum penetration. This can be solved by dismantling the headlight and fitting a washer or two under the lower screws securing the projector unit in the housing then re-adjusting the beam for the correct dip height. Final solution was to remove the dip unit altogether and replace it with a bi-xenon projector from a car so that the dip projector unit also provided main beam via a solenoid operated shutter. Not a difficult conversion.
