JZH

What looks great? Are you just looking at the color? Oh, dear... I've been in California for the last two weeks, so haven't had a chance to even clean out the new garage or move my stuff in. It'll happen this winter! Ciao,

Bright Lights Save Lives... :goofy: Ciao,

I can't tell much from your pics, but why would your installation be different from everybody else's? Even if your HID conversion put the doubled output of light in exactly the same place as OEM (which is physically impossible, due to the fact that an H4 emits light primarily from the center of a glowing filament and an HID capsule emits light primarily at either end of a much larger arc), you would have exceeded the design parameters of the headlight reflectors and would, therefore, have too much foreground light (as well as wherever else the lighting engineers at Stanley intended a small amount of light). What you actually have is that, PLUS the dispersion that inevitably follows from replacing a tiny pinpoint source of light with a relatively big blob source of light in the middle of the same, carefully designed reflector. If you think that's "perfect"... :blush: Ciao,

And then you go on and say "I want to do HID install on my bike"? HID conversion kits are crap. All of them. Not only on the physical level but on the design level as well. There are good reasons for this, one of which is that they are illegal in every half-way civilised country on the planet. So they are all cranked out in Chinese factories as fast as they can stuff them into boxes and into dodgy eBay and other fly-by-night sales channels. You may as well get it as cheap as you can, because there's no expectation of quality and the only guarantee is that your seller won't be there tomorrow. It's essentially a black market. And there are good reasons for that, too. Automotive lighting engineers may not be rocket scientists, but there are some things that are pretty obvious if you approach them with a degree of skepticism. You simply cannot achieve a better quality of light output by stuffing 3x the light into a headlight housing designed for 1/3 of that. Utterly impossible. You can (and will) get more light, but it won't be quality light, and it won't be where you necessarily want it. It will be more light than you really need, but also too much light where you don't want too much light. In other words, it is a DOWNgrade, not an upgrade. But it takes a while for most people to realise this, because HID is so damn mesmerising. (I, uh, have HID conversions on two of my bikes... :warranty: ...but not for long!) I could go on and on, too, and I will...because I don't know mercy! :fing02: Ciao,

I don't know what the "state of the art" in Chinese HID conversion kits is these days, but it can only get better... High beams are not suitable for HID, unless they are part of a "bi-xenon" contraption that uses one set of HID capsules for both high and low. You rarely use high beam for a long period of time, and as noted above, turning HIDs on and off drastically shortens the life of the bulb (capsule) and they take a little while to get to full brightness in any case. The other thing I'm not sure has been adequately addressed in the latest kits is how the HIDs work with US-spec, starter-kill headlight circuits. If your HID low beams are always on, each time you hit the starter button you momentarily kill the HID...(see above re reduced bulb life). I must admit that I have two HID conversion kits installed on two bikes, but they both have headlight switches, so this is not an issue for me. (Only the embarrassment of having twice installed such abominable, half-arsed, bodge-job, wannabe xenons causes me pain...) Ciao,

Was it here where someone had retrofitted Vstrom handguards to a VFR? Not as toasty as those kinds of muffs, but might be enough in conjunction with heated grips... Ciao,