Tremelune
Been Around the Block
One day I noticed the taillight on my CL350K4 had burned out. It was a cheapo 1157 LED tower ($10/pair) that had seen about 100 miles and a few months outside, and only the brake circuit was working. I didn’t want to deal with another crappy bulb, and I stumbled on a thread damning all manner of LED taillight replacement bulbs on the Candle Power Forum, so I shelled out for some Philips X-treme Vision red LED bulbs ($40/pair). It’s pricey, but my experience with Philips lighting leads me to believe I’ll have them for a decade. You could buy a box of incandescent 1157s for the same money, but I'm not interested in losing my taillight if I can avoid it, and increasing brightness on an old motorcycle with a barely-adequate-when-new power system strikes me as a good idea.
Here's a shot of the Philips bulb (right) next to the cheapo it replaced (left):
I figured while I was at it, I’d try and document some kind of comparison. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an incandescent 1157 lying around, so the baseline comparison is the cheap LED tower that was in there on the brake circuit. I'm almost positive that the cheapo LED was brighter than the incandescent it replaced. It's surprisingly hard to find specs for these things, but I'm pretty sure both draw 5W (presumably at 12v) for the tail "filament". Another fun thing I found during all this was that my rear brake light switch is sticky. Yay.
Anyway, on to the unmeasured, unscientific, anecdotal lighting photographs! All photos are the same ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. From left to right: cheapo (brake), Philips (tail), Philips (brake).
Here's a shot of the Philips bulb (right) next to the cheapo it replaced (left):
I figured while I was at it, I’d try and document some kind of comparison. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an incandescent 1157 lying around, so the baseline comparison is the cheap LED tower that was in there on the brake circuit. I'm almost positive that the cheapo LED was brighter than the incandescent it replaced. It's surprisingly hard to find specs for these things, but I'm pretty sure both draw 5W (presumably at 12v) for the tail "filament". Another fun thing I found during all this was that my rear brake light switch is sticky. Yay.
Anyway, on to the unmeasured, unscientific, anecdotal lighting photographs! All photos are the same ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. From left to right: cheapo (brake), Philips (tail), Philips (brake).
