I did a search and didn't find anything about LED Headlight kits. A lot of light bars but nothing dealing with bulbs.
Anyways, I was looking to buy a kit to convert my 880 bulbs to led and wanted to see what has been successful on atvs. I am referring to the kits with ballasts not just those cheap bulbs. Now the led kits can be bought with 3 different kinds of bulbs. Ones with a heatsink, heatsink and fan and just a copper wire to cool the bulbs. The issues I see with the bulbs that have fans is our atvs don't have protection for the back sides of the bulbs and I feel those kinds of bulbs wouldn't last one weekend where I ride. Opt7 seem to be rated the best but again they have a fan but are IP68 waterproof rated. I still don't see them lasting with mud. If anyone has had long term success with any brand please share with the community.
Sorry if this has been brought up, I just couldn't find anything on the forum.
I recently looked up led lights and couldn't find anything either. If you go on ebay you can buy HID kits (with ballasts) in about 5 or more levels of bulb intensity. They run anywhere frim $40-$150 from what I've seen. I debated buying a set but decided against it for two reasons. Number one, I didn't want to try and find a place to mount those ballasts, and I've read where they sometimes work for a long, and other times go bad in a month or two. Number two something I read in another forum said that the headlight housings aren't meant to stand the heat of an HID bulb. Now I don't know if that true or nit, but I'd rather not melt them, or worse yet start the front end on fire. For now I'm just going to wait and hope that someone comes up with a high intensity led bulb that you can just swap out an 881 for. I did buy a $20 Cree led light bar from ebay recently. It's 12 inches and fits just perfectly inside the front brushgaurd. It's a combo flood/spot so the middle section is a 60 degree spot and the two thirds on either side are 120 floods. I haven't run it a while lot yet but it seems to be very bright and lights up the area well.
Your research is spot-on. There are a few "designed" LED headlight bulb replacements out there, but with the heat-sinks or fans that are required for them, will they last? Only going out and spending the cash and testing it out will answer that question. Perhaps you can contact the company that your interested in and talk them into a "test" with a reduced price? The biggest factor with LED headlight bulbs are the design to project the light onto the reflector and the heat generated. I just bit the bullet and bought a low power led fog/marker light that had a 880/881 socket to give the light effect I wanted (green) and put a HID kit in the high beam... works great.
I'm thinking I may just bite the bullet and buy silverstar bulbs for all 4. They're not LED but they're the brightest bulb available for the socket. At $20 a pop they better be worth it too.
I already have a 7 inch LED light bar but we get to ride on roads here in WI and when cars are oncoming I can't have my light bar on.......by WI law. My 880 bulbs are dim as can be. At night with headlights alone I really can't see so I wanted to try the LED kits. Secondary concern is the amount of draw that the 880 bulbs have. Low beams alone draw .5 volts and high and low 1 volt. I'm sure the amp draw is ridiculous as well. I just put a stator in my atv so I want to get every system to draw the least amount possible. If you read my mods list I have enough items installed that I want to create a more efficient system. Since leds draw the least I want to go this route. I've also has hid kits for various vehicles and I never really found kits that really lasted, and I can only imagine them not lasting as long on an atv.
One thing I am concerned with led kits are light spotting. Since every headlight reflectors are different the light displacement will be as well. There is a few led kits with adjustable beams where you can turn the bulb until the best displacement is achieved. Problem is those kits are expensive, especially for an experiment. Thinking on trying a heatsink only led bulb but since my riding season doesn't start until May I probably won't report back until that time comes closer. Anyone else with experience please feel free to share your imput.
Let us know what you decide to go with... and try to include pics please!
Curious though... you said that because of the mods you had installed you where looking for efficiency...?
Are you talking about the light bar and the gauge and the display? Those items aren't anymore than most have on their quads...
Will do. I'm leaning towards an HID kit unless I figure out a healight mod. Upon disassembling a broken headlight housing I had laying around, I feel the led lights would produce black spots due to the lack of a reflector cone for the bulb itself and the fact the 880 led bulbs only really produce 260-280 degrees of light displacement around the bulb. When they say 360 degrees they are full of it. I don't see why they don't make a triangular 880 bulb with 3 Cobb led lights to better displace the light. I think adding a reflector cone would help so I'm planning a trip to a local pick ur part junk yard to look for reflector cones from a automotive application. The AC headlights are easily taken apart with a heat gun, which will also give me the opportunity to give the insides a good cleaning. Another option I was thinking of doing was to buy some 3.5 inch projector driving lights then mounting them inside of my AC headlight housings. I haven't found a set of lights that would be worthy of destroying my good housings for. Most of the lights I found had bad reviews. Oh but they have halos. Lol. I do think red halos would look kinda cool on my gen AC. The HL housings lenses have two circular pop outs one being 3.5 inches so the projector light with the halo would look factoryish. I'd hate to go through all of the trouble plus possibly ruin the housings for some lights that won't last a season.
If you have a front box, you might try these. $20 from Walmart. I bought to plow with, but they are bright, brighter than the stock headlights. At least they don't look like a light bar.
I have a light bar already but we are not suposed to use them while riding on the roads when cars are on coming. I just want to brighten the stock HL and I'll be good.
I went riding on Saturday and as you could guess it was pretty muddy. I'm thankful I had my light bar because the headlights got caked in mud and didn't shine all that bright. I was on ebay today and I found that there is someone making led bulbs on an 881 base that are a straight plug and play setup. They were only $11 so who knows how long they'd last but I'm thinking I might buy a set just to see how they do.
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