How do you decide on proper motorcycle LED lights without wasting money? Cyclops Adventure Sports owner Darryl offers some insight.
Proper motorcycle LED lights are important; we had to improve the DR’s lights as they are more in the class of candlelight than modern daylights. Buying lights for motorcycles can be a confusing nightmare. Ask on social media which lights or advice is like sinking in a sea of quagmire, as most would know.
Light brands throw acronyms and words around, which adds to the confusion. And then there’s the price. It is either Chinese cheap and nasty or insanely expensive units.
Motorcycle aftermarket LED head lights are a great way to help with being visible and making riding safer.
Spending upwards of $1,000 like some BMW boys do to look like a Christmas tree waffling down the road is not the idea. Being visible is essential, but there’s a line where even that amount of light won’t save your skin.
Depending on your needs, it is important to make sure where to stop just by adding LED spot aulights. Our idea is to have better visibility at night or in foggy conditions. And of course to make sure other road users can see us. As a general rule, we do not ride at night. It does not matter what country. Nevertheless, when shit happens and bad conditions will happen, riding at night is inevitable.
For off-road use, the positioning of auxiliary LED spot lights is incredibly important. Crashes, spills and drops will break those mega-priced Dollar lights eventually. I remember when BMW launched the 1200GSA in 2007 with those two lights bolted to the crash bars on the sides of the bike, it ended in disaster for riders. Many of my friends and people we knew had exactly that happening to them.
● Fitting lights on the crash bars on the side of a motorcycle eventually will break off in a fall. They are just not made to take impact and the reason why we fitted the LED bar below the headlight.
● Fitting lights just below or close to the indicators is a no-no, oncoming motorists can’t see the indicator blinking above the intense light of a spotlight.
The choices from brands for LED spot lights and head lights that can take the abuse offroad, their life span and cost do not seem to be that many.
The first limitation for aftermarket lights is the motorcycle electrical system is often the deciding factor on how many megawatts of football stadium lights you want to fit. For a simple upgrade that shouldn’t cause issues, you can start by improving your built-in headlight output.
Replacement halogen or LED headlight bulb, install and you’re done. If you want more light the next option is to add a set of auxiliary driving lights. The more lights you add the more you draw amperage so using LEDs is a great idea because they draw less than halogens.
For a start, I tried to stay clear of external lights, except if they could be fitted out of harm’s way. For most dualsport motorcycles a light bar can be fitted above the front mudguard. That I did in Bolivia. I made my own bracket and bought the best, shittiest Chinese light bar available. The idea worked, except the lights did not last more than two weeks.
Then a fresh new hell awaits to find a light bar that is good quality at a reasonable price. Scoured social media and only received advice from people who bought stuff from Amazon and Alibaba and professed how good they were and paid cheaply for them. Well, that is complete bollocks, cheap and quality never goes together, okay, expensive is also not a yardstick of the quality of a good buy.
Be that as it may, there was just no qualified information or products that were reasonably priced and with any verifiable quality credentials. It is a bloody minefield of bullshit and there, are a few excellent companies having to fight off all the rest of the nonsense.
Why LED lights from Cyclops Adventure Sports:
That is how I ended up at Cyclops. I took the time to email a few high-end brands to get their view and options offered on what I needed. All of them except Cyclops answered my questions sufficiently enough to make an informed decision, and on what will suit our needs. Cyclops dealt more with the serious offroader than the tarmac slapper with the ridiculous light setup.
We started with the Cyclops 10.0 H4 LED headlight bulb which made a massive difference. And as Darryl explained the reflector used for the DR is able to make the most of the Supernova light beam of the LED bulb. If need be we could now add additional external lights but for our use, this was enough. The high beam is plenty enough when used in traffic to get motorist’s attention.
We have been riding with the new LED head light bulbs for a couple of months now, sand, dust and loads of offroad in the Argentinean mountains and they are holding up pretty well.
Eventually, money permitted we would love to fit something like the Cyclops Rally light unit. Apart from it looking bloody nice, the light would turn darkness into sunshine.
To offer a better perspective on the article I asked Darryl the owner of Cyclops a few questions to offer us all some 1st hand information not just on Cyclops but also about lights.
Cyclops is a family business. Darryl, Sandra his wife and Daughter Taryn all work there doing customer service and responsiveness is everything to them.
All LEDs are definitely NOT Created Equal!
From what I could gather, LED’s are the business for use on motorcycles (less heat, use less power, more resistance to vibration, etc.) but there are LED’s and then there’s utter rubbish parading as LED. Cheap LEDs can have as low as a 5-degree wide light spread plus they can be very dim.
The really good LEDs currently have a 120-degree light spread and put out 4,000 milli-candela per LED — but you’ll empty your kid’s university fees for them. This is where sticking to known brands and credited companies pay’s off. Those guys professing on forums and social media how well their Alibaba/ Aliexpress rip-off copied cheap alternatives work is a recipe for wasting money and disappointment.
Make no mistake, not all Chinese brands/ units are nasty and Darryl did confirm that. The problem is there is so much nastiness around the really good brands/units that are drowned out by it.
Can You Increase Your Light Output with the OEM headlight?
Opinions vary it seems, it appears that a lot of it depends on the size, shape and quality of your motorcycle’s headlight reflector and also the bike’s wiring. This is where Cyclops really helped out, they have experience with this and thus were able to offer proper information which is exactly how it turned out when I fitted the LED headlights H4 bulbs.
Questions to Darryl from Cyclops Adventure Sports:
1) How and where did you get into manufacturing/supplying lights? What got you into this business?
I grew up riding hard single track, Once I started a family and found myself working 6 days a week with 10 hrs days my riding became almost non-existent. I bought my first offroad bike with a headlight in 2002 with the thought that I could ride after work. Quickly, I figured out that even with a headlight, I could not see well enough to ride at a challenging pace.
Since I was a tool maker I designed a powerful light that would fit on my helmet, others saw me heading out riding as they were going packing up and going home and started asking questions. Turns out I had developed the first real helmet-mounted light. I started racing 24-hr events to market the product.
2) With the LED headlight bulb, how did you go about testing and developing the light? There are people who will tell us they buy on Amazon for cheap and they are good.
How are the Cyclops LED’s different, and what makes them better?
We were the first to introduce a LED headlight bulb that actually worked in a motorcycle reflector. A lot has changed since those early days. At first, we could get decent light output by using chip-on-board LEDs, this was ok for off-road use, but we did have light scatter and could not produce a low beam cut-off pattern, they were very similar to the HIDs available at the time.
Since we were mainly off-road racing orientated at that time all that mattered was how much light we could get out of only a few reflectors. I made all those first items in my home garage.
As those started to get a little traction we were really beaten up by riders demanding a low-beam cut-off beam pattern. Even though we never meant for the bulbs to be used on the street we did see the writing on the wall and knew if we could get a better beam pattern with the proper cut-off patterns we would really have something. To be honest that was a bit over my head and we needed some help. I found a company that specialized in optic designs and was also dabbling in LEDs.
Once we began to trust each other we started sharing info and attempting to mimic a halogen headlight bulb. These earlier versions were far from perfect and did get copied over and over again, many you see on Amazon today are a direct or indirect copies of those early bulbs.
To beat that, we knew the others did not like to spend money on top-shelf components, so we made the switch to using American-made Cree emitters, these not only provided more light but also allowed the emitters to eventually be placed closer together.
Doing this allowed for a great low-beam cutoff pattern and lower heat emissions. We have many kits available that no one else has been able to duplicate, Performance, Canbus compatibility, thermal stability and heat exchange are just a few things that separate Cyclops bulbs from the rest.
3) Do you manufacture these or other units in-house, and given the designs and complexity of the components, are they manufactured in-house?
We do all of the above. We are fortunate to have great partners in manufacturing and design. Many designs and a lot of manufacturing is done in the USA, we also manufacture in Korea as well as in Taiwan.
4) What advice would you offer for people looking at additional lights, how to make informed decisions when looking for motorcycle lights?
There is cheap stuff and then it moves to the insanely expensive poser lights which many just buy because they think more expensive equals quality.
Thats a hard Q. We would never want to knock our competitors, some of them are actually our friends and even in some cases partners. For us we absolutely hate using Lumens to rate a LED auxiliary light, Its meaningless info and usually overinflated by as much as 100% by some lighting companies.
An Isolux graph with Lux measurements is the only real way to judge a light on paper. What about beam patterns. Thermal management, mounts that don’t break and quality wire harnesses?
One thing people really miss is thermal management, often a LED light will be nice and bright when you turn it on. However let it sit there for a few minutes and you can actually see it dimming down, this is extremely prevalent in cheap lights and even some high-end products.
This also goes hand in hand with large lumen ratings. If an particular LED emitter is rated at say 1000 lumens, and the company is stating it has a 4 emitter LED light putting out 4000 lumens they are playing the lumen game. Im still trying to figure out how a 1000 lumen emitter can put out 1700 lumens.
You can’t run a light at 100% efficiency, if it is made to push max lumens it will have no way to cool itself and will dim in brightness fairly quickly.
If it has lightweight housing this issue is even worse. Good lights have some weight, this helps with heat exchange by stabilizing the light for long-term use. Personally, I shy away from marketing BS. Cree does not make lights at all, they make the emitters used in good lights. If someone is selling a “cree” light you know they are bogus.
It seems a few newer motorcycle lighting companies are actually marketing companies who think they can sell Chinese-made lights by making customers think they are something else. Not that a Chinese light is always bad, it’s not. However, be honest with your customer base. Over time this will get out. Buyer beware.
And there you have it from the horse’s mouth, get some expert advice.
I wish to improve the lights on my bike for main beam dipped.
The bike is a NC750x 2017, the bike has LED fitted, individual chips not H4 et al.
What would you suggest, please?
Hi Simon, thanks for reaching out to us. However, I would suggest you contact Cyclops, they are experts and will be best to advice. I do not have the expert advice to help 🙂
https://www.cyclopsadventuresports.com/