5 Watt Luxeon Star MR16 Question?

Hi Everyone, Great Forum.

I Have a Modder Question. Could a 5 watt luxeon be mounted in a MR16 bulb housing? Needs to be waterproof as well. I'v converted all lights on my sportbike to led except headlights,currently using two 50 watt mr16 12v halogen bulbs.I'v found some mr16's with clusters of 3-5 mm leds, but I dont think that will be bright enough.
Thanks for any suggestions.

My opinion: This would be extremely difficult to do, as you need to have a heatsink mounted to the back of the LS. Unless you can pour molten Al into the reflector, and then let it cool and machine it flat to mount the LS to it, I don't think this mod would be all that worthwhile to mess with. Otherwise, you would have to cut off the post of the MR16 housing and a hole into the reflector. Not all that hard to do normally, but with the MR16 housing being glass, it would be quite difficult to do without breaking it, even with the right tools. Plus, if you're using TWO (!!!) 50W MR16's, you won't be able to come anywhere close to matching that kind of light output with current Luxeons, even the best ones to date.

Thanks for the info Modman.
I figured it would be a hard mod to do,and the light output factor.
I converted the tail lights & signals couple years ago to led, so far they have worked flawlessly and are brighter than stock bulbs.Now most new bikes are comming out with LED tail lights! I guess i'll have to wait for the LED's to advance in tech. before I can do the headlight mod.

Watts are watts and right now the average 5w Luxeon is only beating the average 5w halogen by 15% on lumen output and are coming up short on beam projection. I have to admit that I was more than a little shocked to read that you're running MR16s in place of something more serious in terms of raw candlepower and beam control. Most sports riders I know (yours truly included) ditch the 55/60w halogens in favor of 90/100w (if the charging system will support it), rewire the headlights with something heavier in gauge and relay the power directly off the battery. Why? Because in the land of extreme lean, when your grinding the foot pegs down against the pavement in an attempt to conquer that special road in the big nasty dark, nothing beats having a miniature sun ahead of your handlebars. Why? Because crashing sucks, always. Keep it vertical.

Dan

P.S. Take care of your body...you'll miss it when its gone. Also the novelty of being able to forecast the weather with your aches and pains gets old....real fast.

I agree with you Dan, the 2 mr16's dont put out the light like my stock fzr600 headlight did, and the 90/100w bulbs are awsome.Due to a crash a couple years ago (knock on wood) my upper fairing,headlight,guages, ect. got demolished.Instead of shelling out 1000 bucks for new plastic I went the "Street Fighter" route and am using ane of those Acerbis dirt bike headlight setups with the 2 MR16's.It's bright enough for the mostly inner city riding I do, but on a twisty backroad it is a little dim. Well not so much dim, they just dont have any throw. I'v converted my tail lights & signals to LED and they work great. Guess I'll have to wait on the headlight to LED mod.Man I know that would be cool looking. Also the cops haven't hasseled me on my light setup, you have to be screwing around pretty hard to get there attention here.

Happy Riding Bro!

PS: I switched pic on left, that's headlight I'm running but with clear lenses, not red. Its the Acerbis Diamond headlight.Maybe I should just yank out the mr16's and drill out inside the eyeball part and mount a bunch of 5mm whites, could prob fit 30-40 in each side.Man that would be a wireing nightmare! Hmmm I'm thinkin too hard again.

Two MR16s put out PLENTY of light to ride on the roads at night at up to about 25 mph. Up till about 5 years ago, that was more than most commercial NiCAD based systems were putting out ( and those were $200).... and they were often MR16 based themselves.