Anyone having reservations about baking their headlight, check this out.
I know it works, because i made it!
Incidentally, another great mod is to uprate and shorten your headlight wiring, and then use relays being tripped by the original wiring to turn the lights on.
Apparently a 10% voltage drop from battery to light can cause as much as 30% reduction in brightness.
I checked my setup out before and after this mod and I was getting just over 11V at the headlight. 3V lost!! It's because the thin, poor quality wiring needs to go from the battery, to the switches on the handlebars, back to the loom and then out to the headlights. And then BACK again!
So I wacked a big fat cable (Slightly smaller than the main battery cables, I wanted headroom for extra lighting!) from the battery (via a 30A Maxi Fuse) to the front fusebox. In there I had 2 relays which, through various routings, mimic the operating of the standard setup, and then carried 2 more not so fat (but still way fatter than standard) cables to the headlights. The relays are operated by the original lighting wiring that comes from the switchgear. But these crappy thin, corroded old wires no longer carry any real power.
Now, the headlights are getting a healthy 13.9V!! QUITE an improvement. So now my Osram Nightbreaker plus bulbs are running at FULL capacity and they are a lot brighter than with stock wiring. And to make sure, I popped on a spotlight between the forks with another nightbreaker in it!
You can see in this video that when it gets totally dark, I can actually see. And this is after I've gotten rid of the HID Projector headlight for EU reasons.
Skip forward to 14:45 if you just want to see the headlights in the dark.