Soon after I got home from that trip, I ordered a kit to retrofit my stock headlights with High Intensity Discharge lights (HIDs), which sat untouched for almost a year.

From Wikipedia:

HID stands for high-intensity discharge, a technical term for the electric arc that produces the light. The high intensity of the arc comes from metallic salts that are vapourised within the arc chamber. These lamps are formally known as gas-discharge burners, and produce more light for a given level of power consumption than ordinary tungsten and tungsten-halogen bulbs. Because of the increased amounts of light available from HID burners relative to halogen bulbs, HID headlamps producing a given beam pattern can be made smaller than halogen headlamps producing a comparable beam pattern. Alternatively, the larger size can be retained, in which case the xenon headlamp can produce a more robust beam pattern.

I knew that the ballasts that run these lights would need more robust wiring, so I also ordered a wiring harness from Jim at Eastern Beaver Electrics. It shipped remarkably fast from Japan.

Installation

I took exactly zero pictures of the install process, so I will recap this with words as best I can. The installation process started with removing the flyscreen and headlight assembly from the bike.

Once the headlights were removed, I laid in the new wiring harness and started trying to figure out how the system of relays, terminals, and fuse connectors linked up with everything.

The fused end was obvious, so I connected it to the battery terminals and removed the fuse (so the harness wouldn’t be live). The relay ends were a bit more complex, but between searching for similar installations on Badweatherbikers and some trial and error (resulting in half a dozen blown 10amp fuses) I finally figured out how it all went together.

The wiring harness has two 30 amp relays built into it. These relays are no different than a light switch, except that they use electrical current to flip the “switch” instead of your finger. Once I figured out how they worked, I realized that I was supposed to use the stock headlight wiring as the “switch current” for them. This made perfect sense; since the bike already knew how to switch between the high and low beams, this technique would allow me to use the high/low beam switch without modification. Once I got everything working, I wired in a jumper between the two wires that switch the high/low beams so that both stay on when I switch to high beams. This was optional, but it means fewer re-fires of the HID ballast, and will give more light on dark backroads.

<insert clever illustrations of what everything looks like here>

Shoving two ballasts and a bunch more wiring behind the tiny Ulysses flyscreen was one of the hardest parts of the project.

Results

Wow, what a difference. The HIDs take a few seconds to warm up when ignited, but quickly settle into a daylight-colored glow. When running both the high and low beams together,  I have full coverage across the roadway and well outside of the roadway as well. Street signs glow like they are lit from within.

Visually, it seems like there is twice as much light as there was before. Well worth the roughly 100 d0llar price of the imported HID kit, and highly recommended for any Ulysses owner who finds themselves on the road at night.