Let there be light!
 

Like many others, I have pondered for some time how Ducati could insult their loyal following by claiming that the ST has a headlight.
As everyone knows, the glow worm in the jar is nothing short of diabolical.
For some time I have viewed with envious eyes, the offering from across the water which is said to be the answer to every ST owners woes.
The Ducati designs creation is indeed a stellar improvement over the original, but at a price.
Having emptied my pockets, taken a hammer to my china pig and robbed the kids of their dinner money, I was still a considerable sum short to purchase the Hella equipted offering which I find is no longer available anyway.....Doh!
At this point I started to wonder how hard can it be???
Trawling the interweb I found that the 90mm Hella lamps are like rocking horse poop in this country and if you can find some they are damn expensive. So where can I get some for cheap money?
After nearly getting arrested crawling around car parks looking at car headlights, I finally hit pay dirt, on such a silly looking car too.
Smart have seen fit to provide me with the eyes for my latest project in the form of their Roadster model. So instead of having to stump up £300 for some new lamps, I became the proud owner of a pair from a car breaker for the sum of £60. Phase one complete.

Phase two: Fit them into the bike in a sturdy and eye pleasing way. Hmmmmm....
Being an Engineer and not being a stranger to the black art of fibreglass, its now time for the hard work........

To be continued............(with pictures)......

Ha! Fantastic!

Please put some pics up of the donor headlight and take lots of pics of the transformation, as it will make great reading!

It does seem that Smart car owners need to be creative :lol:

My other half has a Smart Pure that really has caused me no end of grief, but its has, in its own way been interesting learning about the myriad of problems...

Anyways - yes, fellow ST owner, if the designer of the headlight was stripped naked and hung over said instrument of non-illumination, he would die of dehydration long before anything else :mad:

I tried high output bulbs, not much better before going the HID route, did some home work and trawled the net for a good car supplier and came up trumps, £80 I think.

Install was straight forward but time consuming but so worth it...

If it wasnt for the HID on the way to WDW last year I'd probably still be riding round and round Milan....

Good luck - and yes, more piccies please - always good to 'see' !!!

NB - probably too late but I have an ST3 headlight, I'll be sticking on Ebay soon as I way going to go down THAT route until I found out how expensive the fairings and inners would be to finish the job.

The story continues....
 

Ok....The story so far.
Headlight removed and and the glass waxed to within an inch of its life. This will hopefully enable me to remove the sticky stuff without destroying the light itself (still need it as a backup if all goes tits).
Glass then liberally daubed with gellcoat followed by two layers of matting and resin.
This will give me a faithful reproduction of the headlight face which will form the basis of the mod.

Interesting thread for you here:

http://www.ducati-upnorth.com/forum/...pgrade-Options

That ends in the supplier that I used for my ST4S HID kit.

Oh yes, more good stuff on lights here:

http://www.ducatiwiki.net/index.php?...ategory:Lights

Yes....Been trawling the net for a few years about the headlight, have read all there is to read. Conclusion of reading.....fit Ducati Designs headlight. Conclusion of fitting Ducati Designs headlight....Skint. Hence doing my own thing.

Have had HID bulbs and ballasts fitted for two years now. Although it helps, it still leaves a lot to be desired.

Some more pics of progress below:

Some pics.
Donor headlights from a Smart Roadster. These are made by Hella and appear to be the same units fitted to the Ducati Designs conversion.

Very good - you may have the beginnings of a business venture here for fellow 'blind' ST owners....