adventure headlight dual 4" HID light swap

Ultachrome: did you use the motorcycle retrofit kit, and will you post a picture of the light installed in the housing from the front? intersted to see how it looks in the housing. Thanks for the pictures and the write up, nice set up.

I second that not resealing the lens. Mine had enough glue in it to make a tight seal and the clips hold it tight. As far as heat, my 35w lower projector as making so much heat it was melting my upper projector. I can feel the heat on my hand 1 inch away from the lens. I ended up mounting a fan up in the fairing to blow air into the assembly.

I started with TRS's sportbike kit.

I've started compiling some info and pics in a tumblr account you are free to peruse. http://brianjwills.tumblr.com.

I've not bothered with the shroud (Apollo) as I'm still in the debug mode and frankly the one I received with the kit was ugly. There are better looking shrouds but I'm liking the raw look.

I havent heard of other KTM owners needing to do that for projectors...is that with a HID? 35W or 50W?
In theory a HID produces more light because it produces less heat (incandescents are about the least efficient electric light with halogens not much better) and it was most likely a 55/60W bulb that came out of the headlight...

Thanks! very nice work.

I know it sounds crazy. It's only a 35w. It got hot enough to deform the upper bezel. Did you ever burn stuff as a kid outside with a magnifying glass?

Anyone else want to chime in here? Other guys have installed these projectors inside KTM headlight shells and reported no heating problems. Some guys have even painted the reflectors black, which I would think would make them more susceptible to absorbing heat. RSC, any ideas why your setup could be heating up so much? Do you have a 8000k bulb or a dirty or colored headlight cover (thinking of anything that might hold the heat in...) I read some car threads of guys having problems with projectors inside "smoked" lights, but had very few hits on projectors + melting.
Maybe there was a defective run of reflectors...seems I read of some inmates fitting Euro lights and being disappointed that the insides were melted/damaged after a while. I cant remember if this was with Halogens or HIDs for sure, but I think the latter. I have been running a 35W HID in my stock US reflector for about 6000 miles with no issues (and no huge improvement on the light quality - reason for buying the projector)

Is RSC running both projectors simultaneously?

Defective reflectors? It sounded like RSC was talking about the plastic portion that holds the condenser lens. The rest of the projector is metal.

Yeah I was thinking of putting an LED driving light in the top position, but have reservations now, considering LEDs need a big heat sink to protect the driver electronics...

ULTRA - care to share dimensions or a template of your brackets? Maybe getting rid of the OEM reflector is the best choice...less things to melt! I know the attachment points might be different for an adventure, but the rest of the sizes should interchange.

Well I'm pretty good at figuring out what not to do. If you have a convection oven, At 200 Celcius the clear plastic cover bubbles into a nice translucent white at about 5 minutes. The whole assembly was so hot it felt like a gumby toy. Does anyone have a spare headlight assembly for round two?

I just went an entirely different direction, 100 watts of single emitter LEDs

Well, (wiping hands on shop towel) that ought to do it..

Since 200C = 392F, your oven might have been "a tad" hotter than oven temps mentioned in most other posts in this thread. Hope you find a spare headlight assembly cheap!

An update...I ended up with a 35w hid morimoto in the lower and an advmonster model 30 led in the top position with an extra heatsink (an aluminum donut) on the outside of the shell. It all works well and have done about 2000 miles with it. I am going in a different direction with my lights so if anyone wants to purchase the complete setup it will be available in a couple of weeks. Also have another headlight shell with a bixenon bulb and ballast etc. PM me to discuss...
Mods let me know if I need to repost this elsewhere...

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"slackmeyer, post: 17856790, member: 64738

Ok, I got the Morimoto H1 projectors this week. They look pretty solid, better than I expected actually. Now I'm not really worried that they will shake apart- I'm just afraid that the stock headlight reflector won't be up to holding the extra weight of the projector- we'll see.


Separating the headlight housing:

Cut away as much of the sealant as you can. Try as I might, I couldn't get the butyl sealant to soften in the oven.


The oven step is still useful- I cooked the headlight for about 10 minutes at 250. The sealant was still rubbery as ever, but the advantage is the housing plastic/acrylic is pliable enough that it's not quite as easy to break. It takes a lot of prying and working your way around the housing to pop the acrylic off. I didn't find any secrets. Before you do this, loosen the headlight adjuster at the bottom all the way. Once you pop off the lens, you'll slip a little white nut out of an adjuster bracket.



No need to take the reflector out of the housing. I'm planning on riding for a few days with the projector in there in a temporary fashion- if it works well, I'll spray paint the lower reflector section black, since it's not doing anything now.

Cutoff mask solenoid wires need to be fished through. Also: the black ring around the new light is a piece of PVC coupling that I cut, it stabilizes the projector when the light is tightened down in the reflector.




The adapter for the H4 headlight bulb doesn't really register anywhere in the stock headlight. In this picture, it's upside down, I fixed that later. Again, once I test this thing out, I'll use some sealant on the reflector side to make sure the light doesn't spin.
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Where we are at this point:


I was thinking I had H1 HIDs in my fog lights, but they're actually H3s. So I need to order some new HID bulbs for this. For now, I put in a H1 halogen bulb, and rigged up some wires to adapt the bulb to the H4 socket. I'll give it a test run tonight or tomorrow night, I'll try to snap some pictures of the headlight beam.
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I melted four KTM head light reflectors trying to get good lighting , in 2009 I put the TourTech hid headlight Assy in and haven't looked back KTM makes outstanding motors and bikes but their lights suck , that's all . SEYA

Well, it's been 3 1/2 years and probably 40,000 miles since I put in the projector and HID quoted just above. Still works great, I haven't so much as replaced a bulb in that time. And I still have two HID projector kits sitting on a shelf waiting to be put into my car, since it just seems wrong that my ktm has better headlights than my subaru.