It's been sometime since I have done some mod on my trusty Fazer. As Rudy had shown me the new LED signal indicators on his bike last week, and given the price he had revealed to me, I reckoned that this is one practical purchase.
Why, the stock signal indicators are spoilt or what, some might ask. Well, for one, I'm a sucker for LED and LEDs are known to use less power than conventional bulbs. Secondly, the indicator lights I'm getting have integrated brake light functions, which doubles up as a secondary brake light for safety reasons. Plus, the price is very affordable (less than 100 bucks a set of front and rear indicators). Lastly, the indicators are universal mountings which means I can transfer them to my next bike.
While using LED lights are less power consuming, it posed a problem: the indicator relay will switch VERY fast due to minimal electrical loading on it. That will make my bike look like a moving disco. To resolve the issue, I need to include a resistor load into the system so as the slow down the relay switching speed. Thanks to QuizeSilver, I got a rough gauge of resistor rating and head down to Sim Lim Tower (for non local readers, it is a place where one can buy unassembled electrical/electronics components). In the end, I settled with ceramic 25W 6 Ohms resistor with heatsink, heatshrink tube and electrical cables. I could have bought a ready-made resistor load but nothing beats the joy of DIY, plus it's cheaper.
So, what I done is solder the 2 leads on the resistor to nicely cut cables and add on a heat-shrink tube over it for waterproofing purpose. Once done for 4 of them, I brought of the stuff to the carpark to proceed with the installation.
Rudy and Derek popped by to help out in installing the indicators. Luckily they were there else I will be spending much longer time fixing it. Initially I wanted to find a way not to splice the original indicator cable but there seems to be no option for that approach. So, I finally decided to cut the original cables to install the indicators. The rear signal lights took the longest time to fix as I need to ensure I am connecting to the right leads. Nevertheless, we managed to get the wiring up and running and when we did a test run, they worked!
So, once we nailed the rear lights, the front signal indicator installation was a breeze as it is more straightforward (just signal, no brake leads). That only took us like 45 mins to fix both sides and once we fixed everything (panels etc), we did one last trial run and voila! It runs flawlessly!
So now, the bike had been LEDified, sans the headlights, which still have to run on filament bulbs. Awesome.
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