Above photo: Fresh out of the 3D printer and with LED lights installed, this is the second iteration of the complete headlight unit, installed in the fairing of my 1998 XJ600 Diversion.
Ever since I started riding my XJ600 I felt its light performance was lacking. Dark evenings and night riding made me fit a high-end 40W Lazer LED bar to the Can-Am Spyder that I rode for two years before going into XJ territory, in order to avoid wildlife. So since the summer of 2018 I had been looking for a way to get a similar type of light output from my XJ600.
I was thinking about adding a Baja Designs Squadron Pro light to the fairing/windscreen, due to its incredibly small physical size combined with a whopping light output of 4,900 lumens. I went ahead and bought one, but was dreading the moment when I would switch from 40 watts of LED high beam back to a 55w halogen H4 low beam filament trying to shine voltage-dropped light from a 20 year old reflector. So I felt like I needed to upgrade the OEM low beam as well.
This set in motion a whole chain of events that culminated in me designing my own 3D CAD drawing for an upgraded XJ600 headlight housing utilizing LED lights that yield full light output from as low as 8 volts. The first steps of the whole process were described in greater detail over on advrider.com, where I started a project thread a few weeks ago while waiting for my account to be set up here on xjrider. Have a read there if you want all the gory details about how the initial phase of this headlight project came to be.
I won't copy-paste all my previous updates from advrider into this thread here - I will, however, post any NEW developments in this thread to keep readers here on xjrider updated on how this project progresses.
For now, I'll reply to this post in a few moments and share some more pictures.