Low budget 24h race preparation

I have a low budget bike, right?
So if I want to race the Glen Helen 24 hours (teamed up with my wife), should I invest in expensive Trailtech stator and Baja Designs LED light? Those will run me over 500$!

I'd rather try to do it cheap I think! possible? maybe...

Sometimes I don't understand the designers and engineers - When they do have most of the components work on DC power (Starter, fan, rear LED light, signal lights) so why not to have the front light on the same single DC circuit? why to use AC separate circuit only for the headlight???

The AC coils are good for 40W which is ok for my needs. Today LED's of 36W can give more than 2,000 lumenes which is more than decent for night riding as long as it's not Baja speed.

So 1st step is to convert the AC power to DC. Easy enough, and I used full wave bridge rectifier (6.5$) and 25,000 uF 50V capacitor (12$) which is big but will give steady voltage.

Finally I choose a LED light bar which was only 36$ for a pair of lights - just in case we will crash and break one! :)
As I do not have regulator in the circuit, voltage will move up and down some. In order to work under these conditions, light should have wide voltage input range as 10-32 V as this one.

Does this 55$ setup can do the work? parts are on the way but this weekend Im going to do a test run. Results and videos will be here later on.

This is the basic circuit drawing converting AC to DC:

Rectifier and capacitor arrived and this is how it's look like:

Now waiting for the lights...

Lights arrived, I improvised the final connection and something to hold it to the bike and...YEP! beautiful DC current flow to the LED's give steady  light. I checked the voltage and it's wind from 11V in idle to 19.9V in high RPM. Remember I wrote before to have a wide range of input voltage? this is why.

Now to build some decent bracket to hold it steady and soon enough neighborhood ride in the dark. Pictures to follow.

Bracket mock up in carton

 
Cutting and shaping out of 1/8" 6061 Aluminum plate and fixing the lights on the bike

Street test. The pictures are laying some as I took them with my phone. The actual light is brighter and lit farther. but you can see the difference between the OEM light and the LED's.


OEM LIGHT

36W LED Bar

Now I need to isolate capacitor and rectifier contacts and to pack it is some more elegant way. Saturday night desert night ride test! :)

Test results with the basic setup:
1. Rubber bands are not enough to hold the lights in place. Reinforcement to the OEM fixed light bracket is neccesary.
2. For extra cheap setup, lights are not so bad but it's far from enough for racing...

So I had to spend some extra. I've been offered a Baja Designs HID 8" race light from a friend (same one that gave me to try the RR pipe!). I went ahead and invest in Trailtech 100W stator. The stator kit is basically KTM kit which fit right in to the RR's but as the XT rectifier seat up in the front, a 2 wires extension (29" approx) should be prepared. Otherwise it's a straightforward installation with the same wires color as the KTM.

Last Saturday I went riding with the lights on to check that the brackets are OK and the lights can run without any battery drainage. Everything went fine electrically, but the lights weight was just too much on the soft front end of the Xtrainer. It was diving almost full stroke under hard braking and going downhills became vague. Not good.
Lights wise, it was everything you can expect from top of the line race lights. Very strong with great spread.

Then I decided to try another approach, and installed cheap Chinese HID H4 kit installed in the OEM reflector. After installation I left it running for half an hour to verify that the reflector won't overheat and melt. Id did got some heat build up, I believe around 60 degree Celsius which is still in the safe zone. When night fell, I went to ride in the neighborhood and sadly, light pattern was far from good. I will use this setup only in emergency of something will go wrong.



So next, as now the bike have 100W DC power, I wend back to the 7" LED bar, but built another support, this time to hold double light bar. I added a switch to alternate between only top LED bar (short distance, when riding in dust condition) to both lights when the bottom LED bar pointing farther forward. This is the final setup that we will race with. Not the greatest but hopefully enough.