In the world of adventure and dual sport, talking about motorcycle auxiliar lights is something that is just bound to happen. Today I'm sharing my 3 top tips on the subject.
There is much to talk about when we are talking about lights, but from my experience, there are 3 main things people tend to forget, and if for many it will be stating the obvious, for others, as it was for me the first time I was explained that, it will be an exciting new world!
Always starting with the basics, we first need to talk about legality.
I know I would like some crazy lights on my bike! Would I need them? No, not at all. But I would love to feel like one of the Baja 1000 bikes lighting up the night's sky. Sadly, that is not road legal. And that is an important part of being able to continue to ride the bike on the road free of problems and fines. Not to say that blinding incoming traffic is just plain dangerous!
Different kinds of lights.
Yes, there are different kinds of lights that will serve different kinds of purposes. One of the things that hurts me the most when talking to riders, especially dual sport riders, is hearing them saying they hate their lights, regardless of them being from high-end brands or unbranded.
The simple reason for this is that they bought something that was not what they wanted because they didn't know the options. I did exactly the same thing the first time around, I plainly assumed that all motorcycle lights were the same thing. Boy was I wrong!!
Driving lights, spotlights, fog lights, and floodlights.
Be sure to do a bit of research, but on broad strokes, if you do twisty mountain roads and corner to corner is your thing, a flood light is probably what you need.
You just want to look as far down the road as you can? You most likely want a spot. But you can always do as many combinations as you want!
However, the more powerful lights you use, the more careful you need to be with the 3rd point I want to hit. Where and how you plug your lights on your bike.
You need to make sure your bike has enough power to feed the lights you want to install. It may be necessary to do some modifications not to damage anything. That brings us to the other point in the installation, the wiring.
It is quite easy to damage your wiring if you don't properly plan where you will be plugging in your lights. It is not uncommon to see auxiliary lights plugged into blinkers for instance. That kind of wiring is not capable of handling many of the markets lights, if any. And if you burn that, you can very well burn more of your bikes wiring, and that can be an extremely expensive thing! Plan where you will plug your lights, it will be time well spent.
I hope all this information helps, I know it helped me when I learned it.
You can see the full length video on this topic at ➜ https://youtu.be/MWvhzfq2sAc
