HJG Mini Fog Lights Installation in KTM Duke 390


Thread Starter #1
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KTM Duke 390 is one of those bikes in which a lot of owners are finding it hard to find a spot to effectively install a fog light without spoiling the looks of the bike.
I had 2 goals from this mod, The First was to increase the nighttime visibility since the stock lights were useless at night and the second was that the bike should not look ugly with the mod.
Although there were lights with multiple LEDs I wanted something as small and sleek as possible. Therefore I got HJG mini fogl ights.
The next step was to determine the position of the light. I wanted to position it as high as possible to make the light effective.
I found out that there are so-called aluminum fork clamps which were manufactured by Chinese manufacturers.

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Price 850/pair.

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Fan for cooling the LED. It seems to be variable speed as the sound tend to increase on certain modes.
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Price for the clamp. Rs450/pair.

The light has 5 modes and it cycles through them on power on and off if done within 5 seconds. First is a red DRL, then a white low beam, yellow high beam, white and yellow and medium power, white and yellow strobe, and finally red strobe. It is 20W per bulb.

As for me the most useful and the one I am going to use is the white low beam which is excellent in lighting up the road and not causing any glare to the oncoming traffic.

Instead of getting a ready-made fog light wiring kit, I made a custom wiring setup using a 1mm2 wire, a relay, and a switch. To summarize it, the power for the light is drawn directly from the battery through a 30amp fuse and a relay which is normally closed. To trigger the relay, I took the power from the accessory port of the bike under the seat and ran it through a switch that was mounted on the handle. Simple and efficient setup.
Thankfully the bike had enough space under the left tank panel above the charcoal canister to accommodate the relay.

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There are 2 relays in the bike, one is for the dual horn setup and the black one on top is the newly added one for the fog light. It was a tight fit since this is a naked bike. Faired bikes have tonne of space to do mods.

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How to look when everything is back on.
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The Uno Minda handlebar switch for the light.

Final look.

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I have not tested out the light since it's still daytime and I am writing this blog literally after finishing up the work.
I will test it out tonight and do the final alignment of both lights to make them as effective as possible and post the results here.
 
Thread Starter #2
Joined
Feb 17, 2017
Messages
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Location
Kerala
This is the output after alignment.
The alignment was a pain since the beam is in a rectangular shape. The fork mounts are mounted at an angle to avoid touching the body on full handle turns. Due to this the beam of left and right lights were / and \ instead of - - resulting in a X pattern as shown below.
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Tinkering with the bracket and slightly bending it a bit gave a much better output as shown below.

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Although the low beam looks decent in the photo above, it's purely due to the exposure control of the camera. In real life, it has no intensity at all. KTM has actually redesigned the LED setup and reflectors in 2018 Duke 390 to solve this issue. Add to this the age of LED chips they lost intensity. It is not sufficient to highlight potholes.
This is a safety hazard and only I avoid night rides in this bike due to this. In several unavoidable conditions when I had to ride at night, I have had many near misses since I could not see animals or people crossing the road at night.
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Stock high beam is better than low beam but I cannot use this on roads because it will blind oncoming traffic.

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This is going to be the mose used mode as it lightens close range and any imperfections on the road like day light without blinding oncoming traffic. Notice how the focus is at the same place as the stock low beam focus.
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Now comes the bad body yellow high beam which is going to change the highway experience. This, although a high beam still cuts below the windshield of cars and torso of 2 wheel riders coming in the opposite lane.
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This is the dual mode with yellow and white both on at a reduced intensity. That is, both are on at 50% intensity. This is also pretty usable for city riding.

I wish the light only had 3 modes by eliminating the stupid chapri red mode and strobe mode so that I could cycle through them swiftly. In the current setup, I have to go through all the modes to come back to low beam from high beam. My friend who is an electronics engineer told me he could try reading the program from the chip and edit it to disable the red light and strobing mode.
But I don't want to take any chance of getting it messed up so soon. Let it be for a while and later, maybe I'll try that.
All in all, I am 100% satisfied with the output considering I have only spent about 1500 for this whole thing.
I don't have much hope in how long the HJG LEDs would last considering the quality of the product I got from Sarkkart.com. There are updated newer versions of the light with their new HJG LEU branding which has an upgraded LED chip with better life but costs 2x.
In future even if the light goes out, I can retain the whole wiring and mounting setup and fit a better light on it.
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The newly added fog light is barely noticeable from the side.
 
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