Three different brands of lamps over the last couple of years, and I'm tired of jittery lamps and dead LED's. Back in go the incandescent lamps.

Apparently, Philips makes some trustworthy LED's, but I have a problem paying $10~$15 each when so many are required. That, and most LED's are too damn bright for the indicator lamps (high beam especially!) since the big bragging point for most sellers is that their LED's are so bright that they'll scorch your retina. Can't find one that is a reduced brightness for the indicators, and if you did it'll probably be dead or intermittent in a few months.

I had red LED's for the gauge backlights and they looked great, but out of a set of 12, I slowly went through every one of them as they failed. Two other brands did the same thing, as backlights and indicators. No more, I'm done.

The stock lamps and their replacements:

#158 T3.25 14V 240mA 500hr life (#158LL 1000hr life), used for all indicator positions except side-stand lamp. Replace with a #194 lamp, 14V, 270mA, 2500hr life. That's 5x the lifespan of the stock lamp, and you can even use a 194LL bulb if you like, rated for a 5000hr life.

Stanley T3.25 12V 140mA - used for all the gauge backlights + the side stand lamp. Seems there's no direct replacement in a standard miniature bulb number, except for direct from Honda (@$7 each + ship). I work with a lot of small incandescent indicator lamps for the electronic gear I restore, and after a dig through the catalog looks like it can be replaced with a common lamp number, a #161 bulb, 14V, 190mA, and rated for a 4000hr life. There's also a #161LL bulb, but all my datasheets say it's also rated for 4000hrs, so I dunno what the 'LL' does for you here.

I only had two #161 lamps on-hand, so I've ordered more of those. Hopefully this will be the last time I have to dick with pulling the gauge cluster out of the bike for a long while. If someone sold a decent, trustworthy LED replacement for, say, $3 or $4 each, I'd go for that. But seems that unless you're ready to shell out $12+ each, you'll just get Chinese crap that'll have you pulling your bike apart again in a few months.

Bye-bye red backlights...I'll miss you.

 

I thought the whole point of LED's was that they virtually last forever?

If they're gonna blow as well, they're just expensive jewellery.

 

Seems most of the time, that's all they are.