LED Light Project Notes for the PC800

NOTE: If someone sees an error in the tables or anywhere else, PLEASE LET ME KNOW! 🙂

NOTE: Juan informs me that Kevin Quosig did a conversion several years ago where he replaced the incandescent bulbs with home-brewed LED arrays.  See the updates at the bottom for information on this.

NOTE: See the bottom for a few updates.

I’ve been mulling over converting my PC800 to LED lights for everything but the headlight for over a year.  The main reasons I didn’t do the conversion last year in the winter were:

1. LED Bulbs at the time weren’t to the standards I wanted.  Many were too large to fit into the PC’s lens assemblies and also did not have particularly good lumen output.
2. Reports of the self-canceling turn signal unit going bad as a result of an LED conversion scared me away as the self-canceling turn signal unit is rather expensive and difficult to replace.
3. I was having difficulty determining what bulbs the PC takes without actually removing the bulbs from the bike.

Now that there is at least one positive LED conversion with good results and no fried self-canceling turn signal, I’m thinking about doing the conversion again.  Also, I anticipate needing all the extra watts I can get to run the fuel injection conversion project that I have in the works.

The bulbs for the PC800 aren’t immediately identifiable in the microfiche, owners manual, or service manual as far as I can tell.  To aid in determining what generic type of bulb goes where, I’ve put together the following table.

The IPCRCer who has recent successful conversion to LED lights brought up an interesting point regarding the PC’s turn signal flasher unit.  They will blink faster with LED bulbs rather than incandescent bulbs.  One way to fix this is to put resistors into the circuits in order to match wattage with the old incandescent bulbs.  This is fine and dandy if you only want the benefits of having very long-lived bulbs with a nearly instantaneous response time.  However, it doesn’t help matters much if you want to save some watts for extra heated gear or whatever other sorts of electrical farkles you’ve been coveting.

In order to correct the hyperactive flashing that replacing the incandescent bulbs with LEDs will cause, replacement of the turn signal relay and position light relay is necessary.  I am told that automotive flasher units aren’t direct drop-in replacements but that with some wiring, they can be.  I haven’t quite puzzled through the existing circuit design yet but evidently, some people on some Goldwing forums have already figured it out.  When I find appropriate links, I will update this post.

The recent conversion to LED used 68 SMD LED bulbs purchased (it appears) from E-Bay seller USHD.  I will confirm that they came from this seller shortly.  Rather than worry about shoddy products from Hong Kong, this seller appears to be located in the USA.  An initial email to them was answered within a day.  Shipping is a little expensive but I’m willing to pay it if they have a quality product.  The one thing they are missing but inform me that will be available again in a couple weeks is a clear T10-style bulb.

Going off of the “Buy it Now” price on E-Bay, the cost breakdown will be as follows:

Throw in another $50 for miscellaneous parts needed to convert the turn signal and position light relays over to electronic automotive flasher and standard relays and an LED conversion project is pushing $200 total.  But the real question for me: how many watts will be saved with this conversion?

The take-away from all of this is that (theoretically) 38 watts at normal operation conditions can be saved.  That’s a pretty significant savings.  For comparison, a pair of Gerbing T-5 gloves uses 27 watts at maximum load.  Considering my fuel injection project will most likely consume many more watts than the 38 watts that a full LED conversion could potentially save, it seems like a smart move for me if I start getting pinched for watts.  However, I think with the high cost of the full conversion, I might wait until I determine that I really need to switch to LED to squeeze a few more available watts out of the PC800’s electrical system.

UPDATES:

At least one IPCRCer reports converting his entire bike over to LED for $75 and did not need to replace his flasher.  I am waiting for more information on what bulbs he used and where he bought them.

Seth suggests checking out http://www.superbrightleds.com/ and http://www.ledtronics.com/ for good additional information and high-quality LED bulbs.  He says that you get what you pay for.  I looked into these two companies a year ago when I considered converting before.  At the time I wasn’t impressed with their product listings.  It looks like they have some new stuff that is a bit better.  Their prices are higher than what I listed in the tables above.  Seth also suggests going with color-matched bulbs.

The point was brought up by Seth that any extra watts have to go somewhere due to the PC alternator’s configuration.  They get dumped into the R/R which could be looked at as a consumable item.  This gives me the idea of hooking up some extra resistors on the bike to dissipate extra power when I don’t have a full loading case.  Throwing on some simple circuitry to monitor voltage to enable or disable power resistors would make it all automated.  Or a high-power MOSFET might work…

The Kevin Quosig LED conversion project appears to have been quite the feat.  He started with converting his Uni-Go trailer to using LED arrays sourced from Custom Dynamics.  The steps to his Uni-Go conversion are here: Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 3.5, end results of the Uni-Go conversion.  The steps to his PC conversion are here: Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, Step 5, end results of the PC800 conversion.  The total cost of the entire conversion was approximately $1000.  Yes one thousand dollars.  Kevin thinks it was worth it though.  I would suspect with the reduction in price of high quality, high output LEDs since 2004, this project could be done much more inexpensively today.  Especially if you were to build your own array boards.