A Bright Idea

Things are busy but have been going quite well lately. The KLR has been running very well and I've been riding into work every day. After getting some more snow this past weekend, the temperature is slowly crawling its way back up to normal. No more ice on the roads, and even the sand is starting to disappear in some places.

I bought an LED brakelight replacement from Dual Sport Plus a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, there was a labelling mixup and I got the wrong one. I tried to install it about a week and a half ago, but found out then that it wasn't going to fit.

I was a little concerned because I didn't have my receipt and I'd bought the thing back in January, but I called them and they were great about it, giving me a shipping number and sending a new one out to me the next day. The new one arrived in the mail yesterday, so right after work today I went out to the garage to see if I could get it working.

The old bulb came out easy enough (as you'd expect). Here it is next to the replacement:
There are 28 high-intensity LEDs on a circuit board, that's about it. There's a little switch up at the top that lets you change the behaviour of the light when you hit the brake, but I just left it set on the default, which is to act like a normal brake light (no flashing, etc).

It fit exactly as the instructions said, and the swap took about three minutes. It would have been shorter, but I was fighting a bit with the rubber gasket that sits under the brake light lens.

Mrs. HAL had mentioned last year that the rear brake light wasn't very bright, particularly in the rain. I took before and after photos to see if there was much of a difference between the stock bulb and the LED replacement. Both of these are about 6 feet away from a white sheet that's hanging in the garage, and were taken within 5 minutes of each other under very similar lighting conditions (it was sunny outside) and the same camera settings.

Stock bulb:

LED bulb replacement:
Looks like there's quite a bit of difference. This should help make me stand out in traffic, particularly on foggy/misty/rainy days and at dawn and dusk.

Here's the pattern as seen through the rear lens:
A little strange, but again, as long as it helps people see me, I'm happy with it.

Other than that, gas prices just jumped up to something like $1.249 a litre. Yikes. The KLR is fairly good on gas, but perhaps I should start looking at riding it a little easier to see if I can get a constant 50-55MPG out of it...

Safe riding!

Odometer reading now: 9319.7km

Distance since last fill: 241.0km