Baja Designs XL Pro Light Installation And Review | The Light Is Awesome But Mounting It Is Awful
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- čas přidán 9. 08. 2022
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Today I'm installing arguably one of the best lighting systems that you can buy for your dirt bike. Baja Designs of course makes a ton of different lights for all makes and models of off road vehicles including my 2010 KTM 300 xcw. You might say that this is a very expensive vanity project since I had the old TrailTech Cyclops headlight on my bike but lets be honest, that thing is about as ugly as a headlight can get. So today I am installing the Baja Designs XL Pro headlight which is a four bulb, 3500 lumen headligh. This is a plug an play solution that utilizes the stock headlight shroud to mount the light. This is really nice becuse it allow you to route the brake cable where it was origionally intended, unlike the TrailTech where the cable got all bunched up. Installation is prety straight forward since there are only two wires that plug into the stock harness. Where it all started to unravel for me was getting the headlight shourd lined up so that you could point the light down the trail rather than 45 degrees up in the air. Despite having made a great headlight, Baja Designs completely dropped the ball with the mounting system. They included a couple of brackets which are a complete joke and don't actually hold the headlight shroud in place for any more than a few bumps on the road. This is completely dissapointing and as far as I can tell there are no aftermarket solutions for bikes that are a little older like mine. I ended up making a solution with a 3D printer that lets me tip the light further forward in the shroud. This still isn't very sturdy since the mounting tabs on the inside of the shroud are likely to brake if you crash but at least my light is pointed in the right direction now.
Video editing by Nikola Popovic:
/ goteki_audio_video
/ @goteki1987 - Sport
Got the same light on my 15 EXC 500, totally agree that the ability to adjust the angle of the light is horrible. Taco Moto seems to make a solution for this setup but for the 2016 and older bikes have to install the 17+ mask and fender.
Yeah, it’s a real drawback unfortunately
It sometimes amazes me, how soo many products, across the board, use plastics in such inappropriate places. I mean plastics are great, they enable shapes and designs which would be outrageously expensive or impossible to manufacture out of metal, they are light, easy to work with, cheap. Yes there are really, really high performance plastics, some are as tough as aluminium, but then again they are at least as expensive as aluminium plus you cannot weld them.
I sometimes truly believe we are so deep in the "cheap, china style type of designing" that we don't even realize it anymore. Even with generally good design, good intentions and all by the manufacturer, there is a reason, many people feel like the old days stuff lasted for lifetimes. Because there were no plastics, only metal. And even a subpar weldjob is just so much more durable than all these standard ass PA, ejection molded plastic parts.
And as mentioned, plastics are great, without it, this KTM would weigh at least 50% more. KTM actually applied plastics in all the right spots, where they make sense. The fenders, tubing, outer body, there it doesn't make sense to make them out of metal. But something which has dynamic forces, lever forces, impacts, vibrations, just like a mounting point or a mounting braket, is just dumb to do out of plastic.
In mechanical engineering a rule of thumb is, that if you have greater than fingerstrength forces, your longest side on a plastic part shouldn't exceed 4x the smallest size of your part. Otherwise you should almost certainly change the material, or design the shape of the part in such a way, that it get's rid of most of the forces by design, eg. so that the leverage is greatly reduced just by the shape of the part.
Well said.
Baja designs need to offer a much much much better frame to mount their $500 light wothz. The chinzy ass lame job they do is a huge fail considering the lughts are legit and ya pay a forturne for. But the dint help when theyre broken on the trail
Ya its really disappointing. It doesn't matter how much light you have it you can't point it where you want to.