Harbor Freight Headlights
In looking over the Indian Hiawatha I see that I never adapted the headlights I intend to use, so did some investigating today. First I needed to see if I had what I needed on hand to convert them for the tri-car.
Some years ago I ran across some big honker headlights at Harbor Freight and bought a couple. $12.00 each then, if I remember right. They same thing was being sold at NAPA for around $20.00. They were supposedly for dune buggies or something like that. I was impressed with the nice chrome and tear drop shape and figured I could adapt them to my bike builds somehow or other. The price was certainly right and I do like the look of big honker headlights and I couldn’t tell you why.
I had also been fooling around with some of their cheap little flashlights incorporating the business end into copper jewel tail lights. Then I saw these and pictured them in the headlights and bought a few.
They were only four or five bucks each and quite bright, powered by 3 AAA batteries. They had 32 led lights inside. I didn’t know how I woulid replace the 12 V. halogen bulbs in the headlights with these, but figured there had to be a way. Over the years I made several headlights using these harbor freight flashlight components.
I adapted the first one in a strange headlight I made from a Portuguese cooking pot. It was copper and I saw it in an antique shop. In my twisted brain I immediately saw possibilities for a bike headlight. I cut off the pot handle and made a special lens for it out of clear and stained glass (blue for the background, yellow for the rays and clear at the center in a star pattern. Lead cames hold it together with solder at the union points. That was fun and will finally find a home on the quadricycle build coming up next summer.
I made another out of an old headlight for the “kindalikeawhizzer” build again making a special lens incorporating stained glass with a copper disc surrounding the led light unit. Cool beans!
And then I made one following the original plan, removing the halogen bulb from the harbor freight honker headlight and fitting in the front end of the flashlight LEDs.
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This was for the 1934 Elgin “Velocipede” build and I was very pleased with how it turned out. Even with just one 18650 battery cell it is quite bright. I had to take the above light apart today to see how it was that I did that. Forgot, I did.
(To be continued)
SB