# Upgrade cateye daylites with leds?



## saiko (Oct 8, 2008)

Hey all,

I have a few sets of the cateye daylites (first gen I think) These are already 10 years old I think and they use two 10Watt Hallogeen spots.
The light is OK but they suck my battery emty in less then 2 hours.
Would it be possible to mount some High power leds in here ?

If it is possible I have some Questions  (alot)

- Will they produce the same amout of light (more is beter)
- If I use the same battery will they hold for more than 2 hours ? (battery specs below)
- The lamps could handle two 10W hallogeen spots. Will 2 leds be a problem in temperature i mean.
- What do I need (led,driver,...???)









At the top there is a switch (on,off,1 light,2 lights)
Can I use that again? Do I need 2 drivers then ?



























The hole is 2,5 cm wide and 3.2cm deep.

The battery:
panasonic
LC-R064R2CH
6V,4,2Ah/20h

thanks in advance.
I hope someone can help me.


----------



## odtexas (Oct 2, 2008)

Considering the size of the housing you could easily use 2 drivers. Drop one in the back of each housing behind the LED and use the current switch.

Do you have a plan for a new lens or reflector. It is improbable that the old reflector will do any kind of focusing of a LED. The old reflector is designed to focus light that is infront of the rear surface. The LED would be only slightly elevated above the old reflector.

So new lens reflector will be needed.

Heat sinking. Housing will need to have some way to get heat away from the LED and to the outside or else the LED will cook.

sdnative handle the heat issue perfectly with this design.








Something like that is the best way to heatsink and mount LEDs using older housings.
Do a search for his user name and pull up some of his threads. It is worth the read.


----------



## dsvilko (Dec 23, 2008)

So you have a 20W halogen light with efficiency of about 20lm/W which gives 400lm total. 
With a decent driver and optics you can easily get about 450lm with just a two Cree XR-E R2 LEDs and a total system power of a bit below 10W. 
Wait a minute... you have a 25Wh battery and it powers 20W light for two hours? That light should drain the battery in less than an hour! 
Anyway... the LEDs would be about twice as efficient so that usually means more than double battery life.
As for the mechanical aspect, you really don't have enough of a efficient heat sinking capability in that plastic housings. It would probably be simpler to start from scratch.


----------



## saiko (Oct 8, 2008)

the 2hours is when I'm ony using 1 light.

I was hoping that I could just replace the light bulb's with the leds/drivers.
I'm quite handy and I solderd ton's of normal leds (never with a driver) But I do not have the right equipment to make a new housing for DIY light's :madman:


----------



## Bobblehat (Dec 1, 2007)

*As others have said ....*

.... It may not be worth the effort!

I am in a similar boat with my Smart Twin halogen 10W/2.4W (also came in 6W/6W flavour) which are similar in construction to your Cateyes. I would like to upgrade the lights to LED (which are pretty OK except for the juice sucking!).

A few years ago someone posted something on the web with details of their Smart Twin halogen conversion to LED, it involved using "L" shaped pieces of aluminium which protruded out of the plastic reflector housing and acted as a heat sink. The details have disappeared, I can't find links anywhere now, but I think the bottom line was that they ended up ditching the normal Smart wide lens on the housing and using a plain lens instead (I think they got away with the spot lens OK, yours looks similar to my Smart spot).

The lens they chose to use with the LED gave a strange pattern when it also shone through the Smart wide lens, .... hence ditching one of the lenses (couple of years ago ...Luxeon I era ...so details are sketchy). Maybe someone here will remember it.

I can imagine that to devise a suitable heatsink to use LEDs that will outperform the 10W Halogens and retain the plastic housing (if that's what you really want) will be very tricky but not totally impossible. I can understand you wanting to do it ... I'm a fan of the large lensed housings ..... I think they are handy for on-road use ..... if there were a sensible way to have car headlight sized units ... then I'd have some! I like the set-up on this page ... http://nordicgroup.us/s78/headlights.html

Might be worth you having a look here for ideas... http://www.pilom.com/BicycleElectronics/LumoLed.htm

I'm a noob poster (long time lurker) so hope I got the links right. Note that Martin's conversion used side-emitters.

Cheers, Bob.


----------



## pjc223 (Jun 9, 2008)

It is quite concerning to me that the day after I spend some time looking at a possible conversion to my Cateye Daylights, a thread is started on it.

My thoughts for what they are worth:
If your model is a first series the globes are actually both 6W, later models came with a 6W and a 10W (in the high beam housing).

The housings are all plastic so how to come up with a decent heat sink arrangement is the greatest challenge.

The existing lenses will not produce anything close to a decent beam pattern with an LED, I have tried this.

So at this point I will try and stop my negative comments, and say that if there is a way to do a reasonable conversion then I for one would copy it.

Cheers

Pete


----------



## jamiesurfs (Dec 30, 2009)

I've been inspired by your post to upgrade my old Cateye Daylite II Twin HL-RC 230.

These ran 2 X 10w 6v MR11 halogen bulbs which gave a burn time of about 45 mins. Most of the power was just lost in the heat produced by the halogen bulbs. But I've found these new LED replacement bulbs on the internet: "Deltech 15 LED MR11 WHITE" They're a direct replacement for the Halogen MR11 and they don't produce any heat!! However, the obstacle to overcome was that these bulbs but only run on 12v. So they wouldn't run of the 6v battery that came with the original cateye pack. What I did was to buy an very cheap 12v cordless power drill and then take the power pack and charger from it. I've rigged up the power pack up inside a water bottle to the original cateye power lead which now pops out through the water hole of the bottle. I've hooked up the charger from the drill to a lead with a 2.1mm DC female jack on the end of it so that I can connect the charger up as per the original design. I'm very impressed by the results. It all looks the bizz and run time is hours and hours.


----------



## jamiesurfs (Dec 30, 2009)

*LED bulbs fit!!*

I've just found these Trident Super Bright MR11 for £1.94 on Amazon.co.uk 
Wow!! Ok they are a bit longer and the fitting needed some hack sawing to square it off. Bit of gaffer tape and a zip tie and job done. I've only got one as a spot, But its Sooooooo bright! The other is still the 15 led flood which is a perfect fit. I only upgraded my old cat eyes so my buddies could come night riding with me. Now I'm jealous of their kit. I played £160 for my exposure light.

Do Not through your old cat eye halogens out!!!! Buy some LED MR11 bulbs and a steel a 12 volt battery form a cheep drill.


----------

