High + low beam?
 

Hi guys,

I was doing some agricultural roads yesterday around dusk and the lights of the Ten started to bother me when it got a bit darker. The Low beam only covers the first few meters directly in front of the bike. So I turned on the high beam and much to my surprise that also turns of the low beam. The results is of course that the first few meters are dark and the high beam illuminates the road starting about 5 meters out.

Is there a special reason why high and low beam do not function together? Heat dispersion problems? battery draining? ... ?

And if there's no special reason, what is the easiest way to keep the low beam from turning off when turning on the high?

(I am trying to find a cheaper solution than buying auxiliary lights ;) )

my suspicion is that the low beam turns off because Yamaha used the same switchgear as on the X/R which have an H4 headlamp where it switches between two filaments in the same bulb.

i've looked into this myself for the same reason - you need to download the XTZ service manual (become a supporter and you can do this from this site) and that contains the wiring diagram. You'll need to run a new feed to the dip beam lamp to avoid overloading the wiring. I would suggest running the new feed all the way to the back of the lamp and just leaving the original plug unplugged, that way the hi-lo selector will turn the high beam on/off and the dip stays on. Also, done this way it's easy to undo if you decide to sell the bike and the wiring harness hasn't been messed with.

thanks for the tip. Does indeed sound like a good plan to use a separate extra wire for it as well.

it'll probably be a small winter project then :icon_clown:

I don't know how (I'm a complete electricity no-no) but a rider from our Dutch Tenere group has done this. Indeed, he manipulate the switch to have low + high beam together. It really looks impressive.

So, I can be done. It works without problems.

And, if someone does an attempt at this and do a step by step instruction of how they did it I would be very grateful. I'm too retarded to figure it out myself, electrical stuff and wiring diagrams make no sense.. =)

hi i carried out this conversion,i wired a relay triggered from the ignition feed to the dip lamp, so the dip stayed on when the main was used. yes there was an improvement but not nearly as good as a set of aux lamps see photo etc http://www.xt660.com/showthread.php?...t=bulbs&page=2 so i went dack to dip on/off as yamaha designed them and used the relay to power the spots off the full beam

just my opinion stoic

I'm interested in doing this as I want to stick a 50w HID from http://www.hid50.com/ in the dip beam. These take a second or two to reach full brightness so ideally the dip beam should be on all the time.

I've been thinking along similar lines. Initially thought about auxiliary lights, particularly given some of the inexpensive but effective set-ups that people have described on here. But having looked into almost every possible permutation of spot/fog lamps from Hella/PIAA/Halfrauds/Ring/Trailtech/Touratech, it now seems to me that a 35W HID (from HID50) conversion of both dip and main headlamp could be the way to go. The dip to be wired to stay on all the time, to avoid a second or two of unwanted gloom while the main comes up to full illuminance and also when I switch back to dip only.

I can see two advantages: Firstly, it's a lot of light for a reasonable amount of money. Secondly, two 35W HID bulbs will provide a lot more light while requiring only 15W more than one standard 55W bulb, which shouldn't cause any charging issues.

Being a cheap skate (and a courier watching my profit margins) I didn't want to splash out on HID's. I went for 2 x 55w auxiliary driving lamps instead (same as GULG's I believe) - see attached pics for the result.

From left to right: Low beam; High beam; High beam + Auxiliary

Given the spread of light with the Auxiliary lights I should be able to remove/isolate the High beam bulb so that total consumption is only the same as High + Low (110w).
TBH, the pics don't really do justice to the aux lights.

cheers,
Rick

I did the same, I use my aux light to compensate for the low beam going off when switching to high beam.