LED Auxiliary Lights

[heilong]

Originally Posted by oregoncoast

Lights not available?? Per website, they've been out of stock for weeks, unable to put in cart. How are you guys ordering them? I had PM OP and it was going to be 2 weeks (a month ago). Dang it!

Yep, I waited for 3 weeks, then they've become available recently and were sold out again in several days. Selling better than hot cakes, it seems :)
I've registered on John's website (advmonster.com), and got an e-mail notification as soon as these came in stock.

[Catskill]

...trying to order for the black friday sale but I keep getting

"
The following fields are required or are invalid:
24 watt LED off road flood light with 3 mode dimming (0 Available)"


When I try to add an item to my cart...


Anyone else having issues?

[oregoncoast]

Originally Posted by Catskill

...trying to order for the black friday sale but I keep getting

"
The following fields are required or are invalid:
24 watt LED off road flood light with 3 mode dimming (0 Available)"


When I try to add an item to my cart...


Anyone else having issues?

That is what we are talking about. They are out of stock, and have been. I'll be keeping an eye to ebay too...but would have preferred to give a FF some cash

[Catskill]

Ok. thanks. Sandjoh just got back to me. Talk about lighting fast customer service. It was the "following fields are invalid" part I did not understand and thought that pointed to a technical error with the site as opposed to the normal "out of stock" label we are all used to seeing on most sights.

[emreturkeli]

I have the 3 mode dimmable LEDs, the prduct is amazing, but there is a slight problem... It's practically not possible to remember the state of the LEDs while riding, and it's certainly not possible to understand it while riding, especially during daytime. I started to think that it's a problem...

Before I say my opinion, let me clarify that I allready have the 3 mode, so I can't send them back and change to 24W Single mode floods, which means can't implement the dimmer option also, so that's out of options.

Here's my idea, is it possible to add some sort of visual meter, to the wiring system of the LEDs, such that we can understand the mode of the LED from the current draw? actually it doesn't even have to be a vue meter or something, if it's possible, a resistor, or capacitor, or something that will work in a way that when the lights are working on full power, it will let the current pass to turn on a small LED on the dashboard. that way we will be notified that we're running on the full power.

As long as we're sure when we're on the full power, we can count the cycle for the other modes

Please tell me that it's possible? Am ok to try it either ways.. (with just a led, or by installing a meter sort of thing)

[Unstable Rider]

Regarding the 3 level LED's -- and being able to monitor the intensity settings:

As I roll out of my garage, it's easy enough to tap through the cycles as my lights shine against the inside walls of my garage, or even against my garage door or a vehicle in daylight to determine where I have them set.

During the day, I leave them on Medium.

If it's dark, it's easy enough to see the changes as you cycle through them, again, before I start out, it's pretty easy to tell from the riding position- I have a spot in my fairing where I can look down and see them.

At night, I run them on low- or I would totally blind people. On some occasion, if I am alone in deer country, I will amp them up to HIGH, again, pretty easy in the dark to tell HIGH from LOW.

I understand your quest for a meter or something that would tell what setting you are on, sure- that would be neat.

It would also be neat to have hair again and a size 32 waist.

I guess part of my reasoning for having a motorcycle (KLR) is to remember simpler times- for me, a single cylinder, rather basic bike, etc. I get by without a meter.... I am just glad to have the lights.

Just my two cents, others will have their own opinions and stories. It's not that hard to work it out IMO.

[emreturkeli]

Originally Posted by Sick-Till-Tuesday

Regarding the 3 level LED's -- and being able to monitor the intensity settings:

As I roll out of my garage, it's easy enough to tap through the cycles as my lights shine against the inside walls of my garage, or even against my garage door or a vehicle in daylight to determine where I have them set.

During the day, I leave them on Medium.

If it's dark, it's easy enough to see the changes as you cycle through them, again, before I start out, it's pretty easy to tell from the riding position- I have a spot in my fairing where I can look down and see them.

At night, I run them on low- or I would totally blind people. On some occasion, if I am alone in deer country, I will amp them up to HIGH, again, pretty easy in the dark to tell HIGH from LOW.

I understand your quest for a meter or something that would tell what setting you are on, sure- that would be neat.

It would also be neat to have hair again and a size 32 waist.

I guess part of my reasoning for having a motorcycle (KLR) is to remember simpler times- for me, a single cylinder, rather basic bike, etc. I get by without a meter.... I am just glad to have the lights.

Just my two cents, others will have their own opinions and stories. It's not that hard to work it out IMO.

I completely agree... But here's where the story change for me... I will connect these bastards to my high beams in order to unleash lighting storms when I need to flash someone so everytime that I flash someone, I will either flash him/her exactly 3 times so that I complete the cycle and come to the same setting before I start flashing, or I will loose track of my mode...

That's why I was thinking that it would be nice to have something that reminds me the current state...

[emreturkeli]

I found this, but where am I gonna put it..? tons of complications.. if there was a way to do it with just a led, than it would be great...

http://www.datelmeters.com/cgi-bin/w...cammeters.html

[heilong]

Suppose you can find a way to add that indicator led. Wouldn't it be an enormous pain in the ass anyway, if you couple the LED lights with the HI beam? Suppose you flash somebody (not exactly 3 times), then you have to check if you're still in the correct mode and if not, switch modes again. I think it's pretty distracting and will get really irritating pretty quick. Maybe you can sell your 3-mode lights to people who want them (I'm sure somebody in this thread, who is waiting on these out-of-stock lights, will gladly buy them for you - at least if you haven't threw rocks at these lights yet), and buy the 1-mode lights and do it the proper way, with an external dimmer?

[emreturkeli]

Originally Posted by heilong

Suppose you can find a way to add that indicator led. Wouldn't it be an enormous pain in the ass anyway, if you couple the LED lights with the HI beam? Suppose you flash somebody (not exactly 3 times), then you have to check if you're still in the correct mode and if not, switch modes again. I think it's pretty distracting and will get really irritating pretty quick. Maybe you can sell your 3-mode lights to people who want them (I'm sure somebody in this thread, who is waiting on these out-of-stock lights, will gladly buy them for you - at least if you haven't threw rocks at these lights yet), and buy the 1-mode lights and do it the proper way, with an external dimmer?

Hey Sanjoh... are there any way to bypass that 3 mode thing inside the lamps? and turn it into a regular 24w flood...?? I would prefer that instead of selling it because I'm living in Qatar-Doha, so the shipping fee would make the whole selling deal unpleasant...

[Kenadian]

It happened to me today as well. I have not even had these things out on the road yet and they went out of sync. I was checking my battery charger and tuned the key on. I noticed that something was wrong when I looked at the garage door and the light was dim on one side. Sure enough, they had somehow got out of sync. I had all of the wires soldered and had to cut off the shrink tubing and put quick disconnects on the negative side. It sounds lie this could be an inherit problem with these lights. Not happy at the moment. They may be fine but I might offer them for sale and get some Clearwaters.

John, any thoughts??

Ken

[Kenadian]

Originally Posted by tallguy-09

My battery is 100% new and my wiring is also fine so something happend to one of the lights, not sure what. Since I use the lights more or less to be seen it's actually not a big deal if one is bright and the other is not...
Clearwater's are in a totally different price class.

My wiring is done correctly as well. My bike is brand new, and the battery is not run down. The only thing I can imagine is that something odd happened when I plugged my battery charger in. The lights were on at the time and perhaps a voltage spike could have triggered one and not the other. That is just a guess. I have them in sync now and numerous attempts to make them misbehave have failed. I hope it was an anomaly.

I agree that the Clearwater lights are in a different price class and John's lights are a good value and seem to be well made. That being said, however, if this problem happens with any regularity, these lights will not work for me. I am pretty fussy about things like that. For now, I am hoping for the best and will not assume there will be future problems. Fingers crossed.

Ken

[Kenadian]

Originally Posted by tallguy-09

Same here but without the battery charger. I'm not expecting anything out of space from inexpensive "Ebay type" lights and it remains to be seen if these are also "cheap". That dimmer feature is kind of odd to begin with because it's simply not practical. I still bought the lights :-)

The dimmer seems like an ok feature to me if it is reliable. A dimmer like the Clearwaters have would be a better alternative, but you pay for that. Some of the other ones I have seen on this forum seem a bit large and clunky. There is no perfect solution.

Where in BC are you located?

[honda_silver]

Originally Posted by Kenadian

The dimmer seems like an ok feature to me if it is reliable. A dimmer like the Clearwaters have would be a better alternative, but you pay for that. Some of the other ones I have seen on this forum seem a bit large and clunky.

This was posted in thread before http://www.theledlight.com/dimmers.html

Specifically http://zaneinc.com/user/DS-AMD-L.pdf which is a miniature dimmer.

[heilong]

I've disassembled my lights to check out the insides, unscrewing the front with just hand force was really hard, but I managed to do it. The thermal paste application from the factory is indeed scarce and non-uniform, I've added some more thermal paste and smeared it all uniformly. The PCB on my lights weren't hanging in the air, but were rather laying flat on the bottom of the backing plate. But they aren't fixed there, so a little tug on the wire lifted the PCB into the air. I will probably pick up some thermal glue in an electronics shop and fix it there permanently - it's gonna be easy (which is good to know).
Testing the light in my room, it gets really hot pretty fast - which is good, meaning the heat is conducted away from the LEDs. It's too hot to hold in my hand after a couple of minutes. I've noticed that the main housing gets much hotter than the finned heatsink on the back, this isn't very nice because we want the heat conducted to the heatsink and then to be dissipated there. This is probably due to poor heat conductance between the light housing, the stainless mounting plate, and the heatsink. I'm contemplating applying thermal paste on both sides of the mounting plate and also on the threads the heatsink screws onto, to improve heat conduction. Anyone think this is a good idea?