Total LED light conversion, R3 Touring

[cr0ft]

Last year I picked up a set of three JW Speaker LED reflectors for the front and it was a considerable upgrade in light output and looks even.

Which made me that much more aware of the other incandescents that littered the bike.

So, this year I decided I would complete the job and do a full conversion. Everything that makes light on the bike should be LED.

So, the parts list I went with.

From Superbrightleds.com:

- Tail light, Model 1157-R26-CBT, 1157 CAN Bus LED Bulb - Dual Function 26 SMD LED Tower - BAY15D Retrofit | LED Brake Light, Turn Light and Tail Light Bulbs | LED Car Light Bulbs | Super Bright LEDs

The tail light may be replaced later on with something more aggressive, which will be an easy job since it's not modded in any way.

- License plate light, WLED-NWHP5, 194 LED Bulb - 5 SMD LED Tower - Miniature Wedge Retrofit | Miniature Wedge Base LEDs | LED Car Light Bulbs | Super Bright LEDs

From Custom Dynamics.com:

- Rear indicators + tail/brake light halo, 48 LED GEN180AR2, "Dynamic Clusters2". Motorcycle LED Light Bulbs

- Front indicators + white halo, 48 LED GEN185CLUSTER, "Dynamic Ringz", same page as above.

The Custom Dynamics product comes in an 1156 base (or rather with an 1156 pigtail) but since I was going to have to do some wire surgery anyway because both products had extra leads to do halos, I went with hardwired versions that have no pigtail, just a bunch of wires sticking out.

Other parts needed:

- 2 10 ohm, 25 watt resistors to equalize the load for the indicators. The Touring has self-canceling turn signals, and there's no easy relay replacement here as on other Rockets. But, self-cancelling, also not on the other rockets... Shoutout here to @DEcosse for helping me sort out what I needed to do here!

- Supabrake 3 brake light modulator; SupaBrake-3 TRIUMPH These come with the right connectors and it's a 30 second job to add modulators. Pricey, but very programmable and all in all very clever with timeouts when you brake more often etc. Recommended extra. You may be able to get a 15% discount with the code "dafobra15"... if you act before July 2016. See

!

That's the Supabrake 2, there's now a 3.

- Tons of heat shrink tubing in various sizes.

- Extra electrical wire for splicing.

- Some Posilocks and multiple Positaps to tap into the original wires.

And assorted odds and ends.

Step 1: Disconnect the rear harness from the front harness. The connectors are on the right-hand side.



Step 2: disassemble and remove the entire rear fender.



(Some stealthy black reflective tape came in around this time and is awaiting install).

The tail light and the wires to the indicators and license plate light under the fender looks like this. The closest place to the indicators to get at tail/brake light wires is here - but not advisable to compromise them here, this is the filthiest wettest part of the entire bike. Not a great place to compromise wiring. So I had to go further up the bike and extend wires to do it.



Rear indicator assembly unbolted and beginning further disassembly



Reflector pulled out of the housing (it's rubber and just wedged in there - insert needlenose pliers carefully into the little holes by the lamp socket and wiggle it out.)



Dynamic clusters, two varieties (front/back)



Indicators opened, cables pulled out for work.



Black/silver cables. On both of them. Good luck figuring out which is positive and negative. Triumph cutting corners and not carrying through proper color coding. As I did not know this beforehand, I eventually had to reconnect these to the bike and measure it out with a multimeter.



Rear clusters, ready to do some gluing. Clear silicone was used to glue the clusters straight onto the lenses. Note the four wires here - black/orange is indicators, and the two red shades are tail light and brake light, respectively. This is why this was so much work - getting power to those two red ones.



Contd.

 

[cr0ft]

Needed more silicone than this. I wound up smearing thick globs on the reflector itself. Cables through the socket hole.



Finished product set up to cure and after curing.




Resistors needed to load equalize. You can also buy a ready-made equalizer from Custom Dynamics, I went the DIY route.



I cut and bent some fan grille metal into a ghetto resistor mounting surface. Wanted the resistors under the right-hand side cover with plenty of cooling just in case, and close to where they Positap in.



The Supabrake 3 arrives during the work! Here's a glamour shot.



Assembly of the rear units begin. I started with the new wires, for brake lights. I shrinktubed the ends together so I could shove them through the gasket in the fender mount more easily (could have just taped, but had shrinktube right there so what the heck.)



Shrinktube for protection from the elements.

License plate light LED wedge inserted.



LED inserted into the tail light.



Contnd.

 

[cr0ft]

Indicator wires soldered and shrinktubed.



One unit assembled and sealed up, the other ready to go together.



Original and new brake light wires coming out of the indicator housing.



New brake light wires pulled through the gasket (under the fender)




Extending the wires to reach under the seat. Blue is brake light, red is tail light in the Triumph mounted fender harness so I matched it.



Miles of shrinktube. Yes, I may be overly anal about this stuff but I don't plan to touch this again in my lifetime so the hell with it, overkill is the only kill.



I used zip ties instead of messing with the original metal clips in the fender. Almost done here, just needing cleanup of the ends etc.



Positaps going into the rear harness wires right up by the connector under the seat, which should be cleaner and dryer than the environment under the fender, to say the least.



Time to tackle the front indicators! This is easier - I chose the more anal way to do it, if I had been inclined to do it easy it would have been almost possible to do it in place.

Disassembly of the indicators the normal way first.



You'll note in the image above that one of the two wires has red tape around it. This also brings us around to the rear indicators and how they too have two black identical wires in them so you can't tell easily which is positive and which is negative.

 

[cr0ft]

For incandescent bulbs that's immaterial, but for these LED clusters you must have ground to ground and positive to positive. The ground wire is used for the tail light function also, after all. The way to figure this out isn't hard though - before dismounting or even disconnecting the lights, pry off the lens and pull out the reflector/rubber internals and disconnect the wires until it looks like the above image. Do this while the indicators are still otherwise mounted to the bike.



Then measure resistance with a multimeter between one wire at a time and ground on the bike (almost any exposed metal part). The wire that gives you near zero resistance is negative. Mark the wires accordingly before disconnecting them and taking them off the bike. In the rear, also. If you already took the fender off - put it back on, plug in the connectors and measure.

Wires being pulled out of the light bar.



Marked cable (negative).



Time to start splicing.



White halo wire shrinktubed again and passed through the bar. This is where I made it much harder for me than it had to be - I could have just cut it much shorter and passed it straight up from the indicator and into the driving light bucket and done a Positap to the white wire there. But, I decided to once again tap in well further along in the wiring harness.



All four lights mounted and cables attached.



Shrinktubed together. From here I lack images but the two white wires were ziptied to one of the wires for the driving light and Positapped into them right behind the connector under the tank here also, as I did in the rear of the bike. From here, it was just straight assembly and putting the bar back on the bike.

 

[cr0ft]

So what was the end result? Am I happy with it? Worth all the hard work?

I'm very pleased with it. My visibility went way up both front and back and it looks very cool on the bike. It's hard to take pictures of lights and give a sense of brightness but here are a few I tried taking anyway. The tail lights are very bright in normal running mode (the replacement LED in the actual tail light is just 29 lumen in tail light mode which is plenty, but it looks positively dim here compared to the halos). It's hugely brighter at 400 lumens when braking, which is what I wanted anyway.

The camera kind of overloaded taking a picture of the halos, so they look more like donuts, but in person you get a very clearly delineated ring around the indicator. They look even nicer in person, in other words.



From the front, it looks like this:



The front lights are bright but not painfully so, you can look straight at them, but they're very visible. They're also visible off-axis, the JW Speakers are so focused they're not very bright when you're not actually in the beam. This kind of more diffuse light is great for being seen from the side also.

The front Ringz (that's what they call them) also have a party trick where they turn off the white light automatically when the indicator goes on, which is a good thing for indicator visibility. The rear red ones don't and it's not a problem, they make the indicator look brighter if anything.



This is the cable bundle for the connection back up to the front harness. You can see the resistors and the Supabrake 3 modulator, I just stuck it on there with double-sided weatherproof tape. It weights next to nothing and didn't need anything more elaborate. Great product, literally plug and play. I chose to reprogram mine so it flashes at 18 hz or 18 times per second as everything is LED and can keep up with that rate. The result is a quick eye-catching flicker of the brakes before they go on solid. There's also a 12 second grace period, so if I brake in stop-go traffic they only flicker the first time I apply them.

So there you have it. The rear portion of the install was hugely more work than the front, the front can be done with just Positaps and you really don't have to do more than open the indicators and the driving lights and tap in there. I just wanted to do it right since I don't plan to touch this again on this bike.

 

[cr0ft]

It should also be noted that if you just want better LED indicators it's hugely easier than this. The work here was 99.9% for the halos.

Custom Dynamics has 48-LED orange clusters that come with the 1156 pigtail cable. So basically, open the indicators, remove the old-school bulbs, plug in the pigtail and either silicone glue the cluster in or just put it in there to rattle around.

Still need a load equalizer on the Touring though, and those can be bought ready-made from Custom Dynamics and others. On the other Rockets, you can replace the indicator relay instead.

 

[Old N' Grumpy]

Excellent writeup...thank you @cr0ft.

 

[DEcosse]

Well done!
Must have taken as long to write that up as execute it!

 

[Claviger]

Nice write up, I'm front 1156 indicators away from being full LED now myself, they really are much more visible than old school bulbs!!

A total worth it mod.

 

[cr0ft]

Well done!
Must have taken as long to write that up as execute it!

Hah, not quite, took the photos I had and arranged them in order and wrote about what was going on in them.

Though I took my time with the install also, I did this before the weather here was remotely riding friendly so it took several days of an hour here, an hour there.