Mounting HIDs with a BestRest Mount

After adding some relays and other wiring mods to my R1200GS, I wanted to add some HIDs for night riding. When Micatech was still in business, they sold these neat 3rd generation driving lights with Phillips internals. Each light puts out the equivalent of about 125-150w of conventional incandescent light, but at a power cost of only 35w (plus a few more watts during "warm up"). Plus the light is much "whiter" and improves contrast immensely.

My GS was all ready to have the HIDs slotted in, so the first order of business was where to mount the ballasts. There isn't much room in the front of the R1200GS. The cleverest ballast-mounting location I've seen used was the Touratech mount that goes behind the BMW logo on the detachable plastic gastank side-panels. But Touratech doesn't sell mounts by themselves, so I had to find another way.

Fortunately, the 3rd gen HIDs allow you to put the ballasts up to 20 feet away from the lights themselves. So I decided to mount them underneath the rear luggage rack.

I made a plate of 1/8" aluminum that utilizes the 4 mounting holes already cast into the luggage rack. Above is a photo of the plate, as I was first checking the fit.

Here's a photo of the finished (and painted black) plate with the ballasts attached and the wires plugged into the ballasts. I ran the wires under the passenger seat, and down the rain channel on the left side and from there under the frame rails and up into the compartment under the rider's seat.

For a light mount, I checked the half dozen different models (most were prototypes) at the BMW MOA rally in Spokane, WA in July of 2004. The "best" one, in my opinion, was the one made by BestRest, Inc. I bought the extra "L" mounts and attached the bracket to the bike per BestRest's instructions (an excellent 3-page document with lots of photos). The lightbar was a piece of cake to mount and is rock solid.

The HIDs have to "hang", so I mounted them with stainless steel hardware and wrapped the wires in some flexible black sheathing I had laying around. I added some 4-pin automotive waterproof connectors (I only needed 3-pin connectors but couldn't find any) to the wiring harness so that I could easily unplug the lights if I later needed to remove them for some reason. Everything got tucked away under the beak and wire-tied into place.

In the photo above you can see that I reversed the HID mounting bracket as I wanted the lights to be as far forward as possible. Now they are almost in a plane with the headlights.

The finished result! I'd prefer that the HIDs were about 5" higher, and someday I may make some new brackets to bolt to the BestRest R1200GS lightbar which will position the HIDs up 5" and possibly forward another inch.

If I were using PIAA, LightForce or Hella lights, that use a single 8-10mm mounting bolt underneath the light, I would have flipped the "L" brackets over — that would have lowered them by something over an inch, and left plenty of room for 5-6" diameter lights. If the lights could be mounted from the side directly to the BestRest lightbar, then just about any size lights could be mounted, even the huge LightForce 170s.