LED tail light bulb

darrel gunderson

darrel gunderson

Active Member
I have tried a new tail light bulb that I bought from Dr. Atv. that is made and sold by Jon Pardue. I am very impressed and happy with it. It is super bright and comes on instantly! In the day time when you turn on the tail light you would think you have the brake light applied.....I have now ordered them for all my bikes. For the money its so worth it !

http://dratv.com/6ledtabu.html
 
Old Guy Too Many Bikes

Old Guy Too Many Bikes

Well-Known Member
darrel gunderson said:
I have tried a new tail light bulb that I bought from Dr. Atv. that is made and sold by Jon Pardue. I am very impressed and happy with it. It is super bright and comes on instantly! In the day time when you turn on the tail light you would think you have the brake light applied.....I have now ordered them for all my bikes. For the money its so worth it
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Old Guy Too Many Bikes

Old Guy Too Many Bikes

Well-Known Member
I have been running LED headlights, tailights, and blinkers for a while now and love them. They take so little juice to operate. The only thing I dislike is that on the double contact tailight, the element is so bright, it barely gets brighter when you hit the brakes. I've tried several different models and had the same result.
 
darrel gunderson

darrel gunderson

Active Member
Not the case with this bulb! When you hit the brake light it is wayyyyyy brighter ! Its nice to be seen in the day time. He sells them from his website too and I think they are 1 or 2 bucks cheaper. The picture on his website of the bulb is old. The picture on Dr Atv of the bulb is really how it looks.
 
kirrbby

kirrbby

Well-Known Member
Thanks for posting about this Darrel...good info.
Being seen, especially from behind is very important to me. I think I need to grab a few of these for myself.
The ad says 6-12volt...good for 6v OR 12v?? Is that correct? Have you used them for both?
 
OLD CT

OLD CT

Well-Known Member
Old Guy Too Many Bikes said:
One question, you use a red LED bulb AND a red tail light lens and it's still bright?
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The misconceptions of people that do not understand how LED's work is ''buy a white LED... WRONG!
That is the reason there isn't much difference when you go from running light to brake light.
You buy a LED that matches what ever color lens you are using it in. Amber for turn signal, green for neutral bulb and red/blue for high beam and red for the tail light. You will see a big difference in the colors emitting thru the lenses now.o_O Have any bikes with sun faded speedo jewels? The matching color LED bulb solves that issue too!
 
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allenp42

Well-Known Member
darrel gunderson said:
I don't run an led headlight bulb. I use a 25w bulb because I am using a CDI unit. Way brighter beam on the road.
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DG - You bring up a really point here. When you're running the CDI kit that gens up more juice for the lights - and assuming an ac/dc LED HL bulb is available now or sometime in the future, don't use it.

Why? As as has been stated here over and over, "don't run without a battery or you'll pop the lamps" you'll run into another problem. On the CDI kits that have the higher power lighting coil, if it does not have some load in the lighting circuit (yellow), you cook the battery. I actually cooked a battery while testing one of OHTOKC CDI units w/o having the lights on. From memory, it tried force feed the gell cell with 4+ amps. Did not take long before it went out to lunch.
 
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allenp42

Well-Known Member
As long as you have an incandescent HL, you'll be fine with an LED TL. LED HL and LED TL, or no lights at all - do not recommend.

Found my spreadsheet:

With no lights, It tries to pump 3.3 to 3.5 amps into the battery.....and the battery voltage goes up to ~8 vdc (or higher) within a minute or 2.
 
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PoppaBear

Member
Yikes, that's a lot of amps into the battery!

I'm upgrading to the 6V CDI from OHTOKC, arriving in 3 days (total 6 day transit!). I'm upgrading my tail light bulb to the DrATV LED. Battery replaced with a new 6V gel cell...

Should I also upgrade my regulator/rectifier from the OEM stock unit to a more modern, higher capacity unit?
 
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