Let's be honest the headlights as stock on the cb500 aren't amazing. I use my bike all year road as my only means of transport so being able to see well is sort of important.
I've already upgraded the bulb and whilst that was amazing for such a cheap win at under £20 I still felt that it could be improved on when I compared it to other bikes.
I did some digging on the Internet with regards to LED conversions etc and stumbled across an article about voltage drop in headlights.its not just a cb500 or even just a bike issue. The switch gear can be responsible for sucking up to 50% of the voltage that goes to the bulb. So out came the proper job volt meter and yep the bulb is only getting around 8 volts. Well that's not good. A quick strip of some wire and a feed direct from the battery with the bulb connector off and yes the headlight does seem brighter with the feed.
Luckily the article proposed a solution involving a relay that meant the bulb got a battery feed and the switch gear was used as a trigger for the relay. It turns out that Honda are aware of this and the German ones actually had two micro relays built in to the oem loom to do this.
So the first item for the upgrade arrived today....
It's a little larger than I had anticipated but I'm lucky in that my bike has the fairing to hide it behind. Its also got me thinking that I might use the feed for it to run the heated grips and usb phone charger on the bars which would tidy up a lot of the mess of wiring I currently have cable tied up there on the clock support frame and remove all the wires that head back under the tank to the battery.
So I guess it's fairing of at the weekend...
