Offer it up down in the "Fer Sale" forum. Call it a CHROME!!!! BASKETBALL, and one of the junkies will want it!

 

LOL! Not even gonna attempt apic shot for us all? Its ok man, at least you gave it a shot. Get yourself a high quality show reflector and a good bulb and you'll be set at night.

 

I'm not really in favor of 'blinding everyone in front of me', anymore than I am of forcing everyone within 4 blocks to have to listen to a loud exhaust on my bike whether they want to or not. Not cool...

I went the "high-output-bulb" route on my '87 FXRS-SP years ago. The small stock headlight shell (about the same size as the one on my '05 'Train) got hot enough that the headlight connector on the harness melted and eventually shorted out, leaving me in the dark. Also, not cool...

You're right about there being better 5 3/4" reflectors, though. The new H-D headlights are styled rather than engineered. Light pattern control is best accomplished in a properly-fluted lens, not the reflector. The new "diamond cut" reflector may look sexy through that new clear lens, but any reflector comprised of flat segments simply cannot be as efficient or accurate as a true semi-parabolic reflector combined with a properly-fluted lens. I do have a high quality Cibie H4 5 3/4" with an excellent low beam pattern that I could stick in the stock housing, but it suffers from the same compromise all H4 lights do: the light pattern can be optimized for low beam or high beam, but not both. If the reflector/lens configuration is fixed (it is), only one filament in the bulb can be at the focal point of the reflector. An unfortunate characteristic of the H4 bulb is that the two filaments have to be in different locations...so the performance of the light will be compromised on low or high, possibly both. Sylvania actually makes a motorcycle-specific 5 3/4" reflector-type HID light (the brand name is XSighting Lighting). It accomplishes the low/high switch by actually moving the bulb with a stepper motor, but the reflector is still the cheaper "diamond cut" just like H-D's and also appears to be optimized for low beam. Obviously, the best solution is separate reflectors and bulbs for the two patterns. H-D more or less admits this freely by offering just such a 7" light (actually two: one halogen for $130, one HID for $530) in their '06 accessories catalog. If this sounds a bit stiff (it is), you can go directly to the manufacturer's website (jwspeaker.com) and they'll sell their version of the HID for $400. These lights have fixed/optimized low beam HID (or halogen) reflectors and a separate, dedicated halogen bulb/reflector for high beam. The lights in my car are like this and they are unreal. On low beam, a sharp horizontal cut off (rising on the right for signs/etc.) separates darkness from daylight, putting almost all the light on the road where it's needed instead of 'blinding everyone in front of me'. The high beam reflector is then free to focus the light into a narrow cone farther down the road to pick up anything outside of the low pattern, which can be set out 100 yards or more because the cut off is so pronounced that you still will not be offending on-coming traffic.

Sorry I rambled a bit, but I've been studying the problem of vehicle lighting for more than three decades and only recently, with the advent of HIDs does a real solution seem to be on the horizon. So far though, the good lights for bikes are 7", and you still have to find a place to mount the ballast for that HID bulb. I do understand your point about the looks with the wide glide front end and all, but I figure a blacked-out 7" bullet can't really look all that huge, and I feel that the chrome 5 3/4" on there now looks a little small/silly anyway (almost like there should be a squeeze horn on the handlebars to go with it). You may be right...we'll see. I did buy a Night Train because of its over-all looks...