New headlight in the Vulcan

Because of the way the headlight assembly is mounted to my Vulcan 500, a broken turn signal meant I had to replace the whole headlight assembly. So for $22 on Amazon I got a universal replacement.

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It’s black! Mounts to the fork tubes instead of the triple tree like mine dow now.

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Step 1 is to remove the stock headlight and gaze in wonderment at the wiring harness. Notice the big insulated connectors to the right. Those are unused switched power conveniently left there by Kawasaki for user-installed accessories.

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Compare headlight assemblies. Neato.

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The new one is supposed to have an H4 bulb.

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This is not an H4 connector.

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What the ass is this? Fortunately I can remove this ridiculous adapter and weird china-bulb and slap an H4 in there.

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Bye.

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Also bye.

Realize at this point the bolts and nuts the company sent come pre-stripped from the factory and one of them has a split head. Looks like the bulk powdercoated a bunch of reject hardware and sent it? Amusing.

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1 trip to Ace hardware later...

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Now we’re getting somewhere.

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Nice.

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Need to properly bend these brackets but good enough for now. Notice the USB cable coming up to my phone mount. I tore apart a car USB charger and soldered a couple spades to it and stuffed it in the headlight so I could charge my phone. Mounted sideways in the phone mount running Android Auto and charging it’s almost like having a car.

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Bright, and it doesn’t vibrate! Going to put in a Silverstar Ultra that I have kicking around from my NA Miata days and see if that improves visiblity a bit but at least now the light and turn signals are properly mounted. Light seems a bit more focused now, oddly. Not a bad thing, just an observation.

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Bonus pic.