Honda/Huasheng/Titan,Lighting & Electrical System.

I do have a multimeter- and I don't want to act like I am completely without knowledge (I restored a Philco Model 60 radio a few years ago including replacement of some components), but I know that many people know much more than I do- your posts prove that is true.
 
I read all the above first thing after getting up this morning and now I feel quite tired again. My brain has gone to porridge. What's needed is for someone with electrical expertise to also have a Honda or even an HS and to put all these fandangled components on to see if they can run a good halogen 12v car spotlight that lights up the way ahead on a moonless night in the outback. The tail light is pretty irrelevant because a battery LED does that for a very long time very well. It's the front end guys where the problem is and I doubt LEDs are good enough at todays state of technology. In a few years they will probably own the night but as of today the night belongs to Halogens and HIDs.
All I can do is print out the above and show it to my auto electical guy and ask him what he thinks.
BTW I have found a source for good springer forks with V-brake bosses at a very good price if anyone is interested.
 
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Curious, I also worked on one of those old Philcos too,my son had acquired one of these early thirties cabinet models.We got it to work OK,has a nice sound.I have problems communicating with such a diverse audience,you need to give specific fairly foolproof instructions,but not be perceived as snootily talking down to people.If you feel able to make measurements that would be great.There is a lot of EMI garbage emanating from these engines esp. the Chinese variety with their distributed ignition arrangements,twisting your meter leads& sticking a 0.1 ceramic cap with short leads directly on your VOM helps to get rid of this nasty stuff,that can really mess you up.
 
I really appreciate the detail of your posts. You are correct to not assume any specific level of knowledge.

You mention that EMI- one place I lived several years ago, there was a guy with a Porsche 912 (yes, 912, not 911)- I could tell he was coming long before I heard the car because his unshielded ignition system screwed with my TV reception from quite a ways away.
 
Shielding for RFI like that Porsche is fairly straightforward,shielding for stray magnetic fields,produced by currents is far trickier,most people are completely clueless,conventional "shielding", putting metal around something is ineffective,the key is to minimise loop coupling and avoid using the frame as general purpose current dump.
 
Without any info to better characterise the Honda black wire output,I'm at sea regrettably, and I'm frankly reluctant to send people down the primrose path based on mere gut feelings.Based on Fetor56's experimental results it looks to me that the Honda Black Wire output has real potential, either as a direct output,or more likely to charge a battery and that a viable design ought to be possible without affecting engine performance unduly.If I get more info I feel confident I can come up with something.
How much power does one of those halogen jobs take?
 
We can't take that black wire seriously as a descent standalone power source....sure by itself it will power a small(4 led's) tail light at startup but that requires minimal power.Trying to start the engine with even the LED headlight on(suppled pic) and it won't start.....disconnect it and it will start.
People thinking of a good beamed headlight need a battery;use the black wire as a trickle charger for that battery.Even then i'm pretty sure the battery will go flat over time.....just more time.
 
Be that as it may and one should not get carried away that this is some panacea,on the other hand an LED headlight is about the last thing I would have considered directly hooking up to a kill switch, due to its load characteristics, that it works at all gives some hope that with an intelligent design,adequate power to charge a battery might be extracted,if one desired to do so.With a small portion of nighttime riding this may be enough to be worth it.Batteries go dead and people die eventually,vanity of vanities etc,so what?.But characterizing the blackwire output is necessary in order to assess it's potential, as I have described previously.
 
... to see if they can run a good halogen 12v car spotlight that lights up the way ahead on a moonless night in the outback.
Unfortunately, I don't see that happening. The kill switch works by shorting out the primary side of the coil. The A/C pulses of electricity which would normally be stepped up in voltage a few hundred times in the coil to create the spark get shunted to ground, and no spark is created. A standard headlight, halogen headlight, etc,. has a very low electrical resistance. (12V, 55W is .04 Ohm, and even less until it heats up.) If you place a halogen headlight directly across the coil (which is what you would be doing) it would work just like a kill switch. It just sucks ALL the power away from the spark. Another way to think of it is that the magneto pickup coil is limited to a certain amount of power that it can provide. If you divert too much of it away from the spark plug, the plug won't 'spark,' and that pretty much defeats the entire purpose of the thing...

What folks have fould out by experimentation is that with white-wire systems, you can draw away about 3 watts of power before it seriously impacts the spark - before you have to reduce your spark gap to account for the reduced spark power that's available. Someone will have to test this with the black-wire system on the 4-strokes.
The tail light is pretty irrelevant because a battery LED does that for a very long time very well. It's the front end guys where the problem is and I doubt LEDs are good enough at todays state of technology...
Well, the new LEDs seem to do the job just fine. A 3-watt LED is awfully bright.

Now, what you might have to do is to decide what you can live with. Suppose you decide that you absolutely HAVE to have 6 watts of LED light. OK. What percentage of the time that you ride do you need this light? In my case, I commute to/from work. During the winter months, I would need lights about 50% of the time. If I could capture all the power from the black/white wire, and store it in a battery when I'm NOT using the light, that battery can then supplement the white/black wire at night, when the light is on. And, if I ran out of battery on an extended night run, I could always switch off one of the LEDs and run a little slower.

This design tradeoff is what I'm looking at with my dynohub approach.
 
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