Bonneville America Forums Forums Technical Forums Accessories Re: Silver Bullet LED problem, HELP

I have mounted the red LED silver bullets and tombstone tail light on the back of my bike with no problem. I mounted the amber LED silver bullets to the turn signal relocater bracket I bought from Ma's. Here is the problem: the amber LED's have 3 wires (black, blue and violet. The Triumph pumpkins only have 2 wires each from what I can see, similar to the rear blinkers. I connected the black and violet wires to the wires from the existing pumpkins and left the blue wire alone. Then installed the load equalizer as I did for the rear blinkers. Now when I put switch the right or left turn signal on, both blink on the front and both blink on the rear. Normal speed blinking, not the rapid blinking the instructions warn about. Any ideas what I have done wrong? I'm sure I am not the first to try these on the front and back together. Please help this electronic illiterate.

Interesting. Did you insulate the ends of the violet wires or are they just floating around? You don't mention how/where you connected the load equalisers - they'd be my first suspicion. It's not going to damage anything to run the signals without them, they'll just flash fast. So disconnect all the equalisers and see if it still happens. If not, reconnect one at a time and test for a problem. Failing that, start disconnecting the lights one at a time and testing. FYI as far as I know you don't really need four equalisers, just two. One for the right and one for the left, since the front and rear lights are connected together.

I don't really like load equalisers, they're a bandaid solution for a problem that shouldn't really exist. The better solution is to dump the equalisers and change the flasher unit for one that either doesn't have "load detection" or one that's designed for LED lights. You can get them at any half-decent auto parts shop - just take in your original one to compare the connector to.

Matt

Matt,

The blue wires on each new LED signal is just left floating. Before i mounted the 2 LED signals up front, the rear signals with the 1 load equalizer were working correctly. I then added the 2 LED signals up front connecting the violet wires to the hot signal wires and the black wires to the original black wires. I was wondering if I needed to install another equalizer for the front if I already had one installed for the rear. Would having 2 installed throw it off like this? Trial and error right?

That sounds about right for the wires - just make sure you insulate the ends of the blue wires so they don't touch anything earthed.

My understanding of the equalisers is that you only need 1 per "side", that each one will sort out up to two sets of LED's - that of course may change by brand so if yours have docs that say different then go with that.

In theory you really only need ONE equaliser for the whole bike - it'd go between the output of the flasher and earth. That'd need to be a fairly big one tho as it'd make a lot of heat.

Having too great a load (ie: too many equalisers) on a flasher could possibly burn it out or make it act in an unusual way, but it won't make the left & right flash together - that's got to be a wiring error or similar, since the flasher output divides into left & right circuits at the direction switch.

I still recommend getting an LED flasher to replace your standard and dumping the equalisers. This both simplifies the circuit and takes advantage of the LED's low current requirements that having the equalisers stuffs up.

Be aware that using equalisers means you can't fit hazard (ie: four way) flashers to your bike.

Matt