LEDS
I am a big fan of LEDS. I usually buy them from www.customdynamics.com. Dave and Lyn own the place and have always been both helpful and responsive to any request I ever had. I can not recall a time when I felt mistreated or felt anything negative about this company. Other companies should take a lesson on customer service from Custom Dynamics as they do it the old way, the customer is the reason they exist.
At this point I am trying hard not to put a bunch on and look like a scene from Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind. So showing much restraint, I have added just a few. The tail lights and rear signals are LEDs but I didn't do the front turn signals with LEDs. No particular reason, I just didn't. I did install them when I had my VT1100C as you can see, that bike looked awesome... that was a fun project... large and small Silver Bullets, under the tank lighting, side marker bars and dual 1.85" clusters as run/brake on the back. I always use the 3M Auto Trim Tape to mount these units with. It is the tape that has the red backing on it. It is more expensive that other types of double sided tape but it holds year round. The cheapest place I have found it is as Home Depot. It's a bigger and wider roll for less cost than from Pepboys. When mounting the LEDS, make sure to take an alcohol wipe and wipe the area where you intend to mount the LED. The best thing about using tape as opposed to glue is that you can move them around if you want and if your wiring harness has a service loop in it. (extra wire that you didn't cut off but rolled it in a loop or snaked it back up under the tank or whatever) If you are going to mount the round LED boards in your turn signals, I suggest going with foam rubber or sponge material and cut out a pattern for the board to nestle in inside the turn signal housing. Spray foams are not easy to work, they ruin your clothes and are a complete pain to deal with if you decide to sell the bike and keep the LED boards and go back to stock.
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Anyway
back to the Nomad, I added some front and rear side marker LEDS.
All you have to do is pick up +12v and a ground to supply power to these pods and your good to
go. The trick is to do it so it doesn't look like you did or at least minimize
the wires as best you can. It may sound silly but I try not to confuse other
drivers with lights that do not follow DOT guidelines, so in keeping with the
general rule of thumb for light placement, I have amber
for the front and red on the rear of the bike.
The amber LED is also wired into the alternating blink circuit on the Magic Blinkers. Turn indicator LED on the side. Video |
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The biggest challenge was to come up with a layout for the LEDS in the left, right and center rear tail light housings. For he left and right housings, I used are the 1.85" round LED clusters from Radiantz and the center tail light under the License Plate is the cateye 88 LED board. I only used the 88 board for the run/brake signal. I did not use the mounting pan that came with the board. You probably wondering why in the picture on the right one of the circles isn't lit. That's my turn signal and it only lights when the signal is activated. The round one below it is the run/brake cluster. These babies really light up at night and most people do not tailgate me. In fact, they are so bright when I hit the brakes that people usually stop some 20 feet behind me instead of 2 feet behind me.
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And since I did this multi-rear tail light housing thing, I went ahead and put lights in each saddlebag, which make a big difference in the dark since I use bag liners which zip open from the top of the bag. |
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