Just wanted to share my little foglights project. Since I recently moved to a somewhat more country-ish area, I just needed more light from the bike when rideing the last 10km of my daily trip on small roads in the woods.
I was first thinking of the Givi's S320, but they are quite expensive and not black. I liked the oval lens very much, wich creates a nice horizontal flat beam instead of just a round column of light. But these oval's seem hard to find. The other option was a BMW copy slash China verion with oval lens:
http://www.ebay.nl/itm/2x-Cree-LED-Fog-Light-Auxiliary-Driving-Lamp-for-BMW-K1600-R1200GS-ADV-F800GS-/322218061183?hash=item4b05b16d7f:g:E4gAAOSwa~BYWf5CSo I ordered the china versions and when received, hooked them up to the 12V aux. Not surprisingly the bad quality led driver caused so much HF interference that the whole bike was in error. After some experiments on the 12V line, which where not that succesfull, I decided to open the lights and have a look on the onboard driver. To my surprise it looked not that bad, but a capacitor of any serious value was clearly missing to decouple the 12V supply line. After adding a simple 10uF 50V capacitor straight behind the first diodes (protection against reverse polarity I think) all was good! How can they save a 1 cent part to increase the product quality so easily?
After having all this working I let a local metal worker make two small pipe's out of aluminium to mount the lights on. See the drawing below. The lights are mounted on this small aluminium pole which is screwed down to an existing M5 location wich is there to hold the bodywork in place.
I will post some nightly pic's when I'm on the road again and some more detailed pic's of the setup when it stops raining.. The light beam is very low, powerfull and in a nice horizontal lightpattern, wich clearly lits any sign on 50 meters ahead. Very nice. The lights are about 6000K, so I have to change the headlights also
This rain brings me to another point. When removing the tank plastic I was a bit shocked by the situation of the connectors underneath. In winter they use a lot of salt on the roads here in Holland and this has a huge impact on the wiring and especially the clear exposed SAE connector wich was completely green of oxidation.
I disconnected all plugs, rinsed them off carefully to remove as much of the salt a possible and dried them with a hairdryer. After all this I putted all connectors into shrink tube and tied the ends with tie-wraps to make it as tight as possible. I hope this is now really european weather style proof!
EDIT: After riding for a while with these protected connectors all chassis isolation faults are gone. No flashing red triangle anymore while in moisture or heavy rain.
