[Destructive] headlight disassembly

[random1781]

The mounting tabs on this headlight had broken, and as some of y'all are aware, there are no replacement parts for the headlight assembly. I like taking things apart, so I finally had a dead headlight to tinker with.

 

Boy, this thing is virtually indestructible. All y'all who broke your headlights....kudos for doing something in half a second that took me probably 2 hours. This plastic is extremely strong and molded into a very sturdy shape.

 

I had no idea what I was doing, so I was just hacking, smashing, and prying my way through it. The main (and only) obstacle to actually disassembling it was the clear front plastic...

 

 

It's fastened by several tabs along the edges, so ostensibly you just pop these and you should be able to remove it. However, there's also a really thick layer all around the edges of a tacky/stretchy liquid gasket type material. That edge is also recessed in the channel that run around the rest of the assembly, so there's not really a way to get at the glue to remove it, and this is why the headlight is not serviceable...

 

 

That's a shame, because otherwise it's all very straightforward to disassemble and it's built well. The screws around the clear plastic hold the black plastics on around the front of it. They're only accessible from inside the clear plastic. The lights are held on to the silver frame, which is how the adjustments are made.

 

The lenses are held on pretty good and should not fall off.

 

 

Each light is about 25% lens, 70% heat sink, 4% circuit board, and 1% LED...

 

 

So each "light" is just a pair of LEDs with no additional circuitry. All of that is located on the controller sits inside the bottom bit near the running lights at the bottom...

 

 

The entire thing is lacquered, so it's completely sealed from water, which makes sense since it's at the very bottom of the assembly, and I've seen pictures of people with a pool of water at the bottom of their lights. Bummer though because I wanted to poke around at it, but being sealed makes it difficult. You can still see what does what though. The centered bits are mirrored, so one side is probably for the low beams and the other for the high. The bottom left is the bottom running light.

 

This board is connected directly to a fuse and has a ground. The two other wires are actually both from the same source at the ECU (red/yellow)...

 

 

That wire splits off into the the blue/black wire that goes directly into the headlight. I think this powers the running light when you turn the key on before starting the bike and could provide a dim backup in case your headlight fuse blows. That same wire goes to the high beam switches before looping back to the headlight.

 

During normal operation the red/yellow wire provides 12V from the ECU to the controller through both the blue/black wire and the yellow wire coming from the high beam switches. When you engage the high beam switch, you're actually turning the switch off, so the controller now sees 12V coming in only through the blue/black. It probably uses that difference in voltage as the logic to turn the high beams on.

 

I'm not really sure why they did it this way, but it does provide a fail-on situation where, if something does fail, there's a higher chance that the lights will default to being on. This could obviously be helpful if something weird does happen on the road so you're not stuck in the dark.

 

So there you have it...T7 headlight in a nutshell.

[Hibobb]

As a kid, you must have drove your mother nuts!

[Ede-DE]

It's great to have a look at all the internals of a nutshell.

[random1781]

1 hour ago, Ede-DE said:

It's great to have a look at all the internals of a nutshell.

It felt like cracking one!

[TimmyTheHog]

Thanks for doing this so I don't have to lol...

Always curious on how inside looks like but I can't justify opening my without spending more money at it lol

[random1781]

6 hours ago, TimmyTheHog said:

Thanks for doing this so I don't have to lol...

Always curious on how inside looks like but I can't justify opening my without spending more money at it lol

Right? I hate black boxes.