• Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

OEM Headlight - how to fix it

Engenia

Engenia

Husqvarna
AA Class
Husqvarna managed to make a half decent looking adventure bike, but they cut a lot of corners under the skin to keep the price down, in particular, the headlight.

I don't normally plan to ride at night, but I've had to do it several times, and the view you get from the cockpit is myopic, to say the least. I found it far better to use the lights of the bike ahead than my own
So, I've had a few shots at improving the lights.
  1. I added an extra spot light and put a 55W HID globe in it. That is seriously good at spotting possums in the trees, but it really needed to be a driving light, with a bit more spread, and of course, it didn't improve the low beam view.
  2. I thought I'd try to install a projector inside the headlamp. So I bought a couple of the smallest ones I could find, with solenoid control over the low beam mask, but when I got them they were 20 mm too long and I couldn't think of a way of shoe-horning one in without some serious plastic surgery.
  3. Then I tried replacing the 55W H4 QI globe with a 55W H4-3 HID. It uses a single globe for high and low beam, and moves the light source to the relevant positions for high and low. It has a control box that keeps the light on for high and low beam, and moves the position with a solenoid. The light output improved 3X, but it was all over the place because the light source positions weren't accurate enough. I wouldn't have enjoyed being an oncoming car. HID's don't work well with a reflector, and the positions of the light source were just wrong.
  4. The solution, I thought, was two 55W 4300K HID's and stand-alone projectors. It just so happens that the Sachs Madass uses just this arrangement, but with QIs, and they are readily available cheaply, on ebay. So I bought a set. The low beam needs to remain on when using HIDs, as they can take several seconds to brighten, but the H4-3 controller sorts this out. If I didn't have that controller already installed I would have rigged up a relay and a diode from each position of the high/low beam switch to run it.
Over the last couple of days I made up a frame to hold the projectors using the existing three mounting points. I had to heat up the bottom internal cross piece and push it back by 20 mm, but that went easily. Last night I turned them on for the first time to confirm that they were pointing in the right direction with enough room for adjustment. It seemed ok in the shed. I've set up markers on the back roll-a-door (and floor) for this purpose.

20180214_162804_TR650_headlight.jpg


20180214_162824_TR650_headlight.jpg

Today I added the top adjustment bracket using the original plastic adjuster captive nut. You can just about see half of it in the pic below, secured with a couple of M4 screws each side.
20180214_162938_TR650_headlight.jpg

The front white fill-in panel (not installed in the pics) fouls the bottom light bracket, so there's some work to be done there. For now, being nylon, it'll bend and fit where it touches. Hopefully it won't break.
(Later, that night)
It's 2230 & I've just taken Moe out to Wallaroo Rd into NSW, where there are no street lights, and I've just got two words.
Problem Solved

It remains to be seen if they hold up to the rigors of the gravel roads/tracks I sometimes find myself on.
 
20180215_211651_TR650_headlight.jpg

That'll do for now.
Maybe later I'll paint the aluminium frames gloss black.
Might even look at making a CF panel to tidy it up a bit. No CF anywhere on the bike so would probably use black gel-coat.
 
I personally love it. Reminds me of the Buell Ulysses dual lamp I once fitted to a DRZ 400. Horizontally stacked though... yours is a tidy setup! Being mostly lazy, I stuck a Cyclops in mine almost immediately (light is a bit scattered but not blinding to oncoming traffic... and no doubt there’s a lot more of it) and stuck a set of Rigid Dually’s on either side of the fork (at the upper triple fixing bolts) The bonus there is that I bought one “spot” and one “flood” pattern. Both on their own relay, both also switched on the dash. The relay for the spot will only activate while the high beam is active to keep from having to reach awkwardly for the switch (when the switch is on it just comes on/off with the high beam). The flood is a really nice wide pattern that really illuminates both sides of the road but has a short cutoff, maybe 1/3 the range of the headlamp while the spot pattern overruns the headlamp by a good amount.
 
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