Lately, I’ve been feeling that my halogen bulb has been getting weaker, especially the low beam. At night (and at the speeds I usually ride at), I find myself overriding it’s beam quite often which is not a good idea at all. (I use the highbeam as often as possible, but if there’s oncoming traffic, I’ll run the low beam out of courtesy – maybe that’s not a good idea, either.)
Anyway – the bulb King had was farkin’ powerful! And white!
Not the lazy yellow stuff that sealed bulbs (and of late; my halogen
bulb) give off. This thing gave off a
clear, crisp, bright-white beam that was easily seeable even in the bright
sunshine of mid-day in the middle of a field at the Rendezvous.
He looked in to the part number for me and off I went. I found the bulb and the manufacturer’s home
page and then went into research mode on the interwebs; would this bulb fit my 2014
Street Glide? It comes with three
different base adapters so the website claimed it would fit 90% of all bikes
out there. Well that’s great and all,
but I know my luck and if there’s a chance something won’t work for me, there’s
a high probability I’ll fall into that small percentage of non-fitment.
Back to the research.
I found all sorts of info about how great the bulb was, but nothing
about whether it would specifically fit my bike. Over and over, I found testimony about how
the various base adapters made this thing work for such a broad spectrum of
bikes, and there wasn’t one person yet who’d run into non-fitment issues.
I finally gave up (due more to exuberance about buying a new
super bright headlight than anything else) and went ahead and ordered it. I followed the tracking, and sure enough; it
was waiting for me when I got home last night.
SWEET!!
The heat be damned (it was Hazy, Hot & Humid out), I set
right to opening the box up and then removing my fairing. And that’s when I found that my bike indeed
fell within the 10% category.
Dammit! This is also where I
found that in addition to doing research on-line, I should have also looked at
my bike. I had forgotten that I have two
separate bulbs! Even worse, the harness
connection is the wrong fit for the bulb. Fcuk! I
now own a $70 bulb which is useless to me.
Awesome.
So I came in this morning to look up the website and see if
they have any kind of return policy (fat chance with electronics). I didn’t see anything about refunds or
returns, but I did find they sell a harness adapter…which looks like it would
fix the problem for me. It would replace
the existing HD harness, which runs power to both bulbs, with a harness that
would run just to the new bulb, presumably leaving the other bulb unused.
I emailed them this morning to ask specifically that; will
the harness allow me to run the bulb I just bought, presumably leaving the
other bulb sitting in the headlamp housing, unused? I’d like to have some kind of confirmation
from them before I hand them any more money.
(Maybe if I’d done this the first time, I’d have had all the info I
needed at the start.)
So we’re in a holding pattern. I hope the replacement harness works, because
I really want to run that bulb.
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