is there any way to change the bright lights from being h9 to another type of light that you can find at an auto part store. the h11 low beams i got the sylvania silverstar ultra h11 and i love them they made my low beams so much brighter, but with me living in a small town there are very limited options on bike shops to find parts and almost any parts i need for my zx14 they have to order it or i have to end up ordering it. when i would like to just walk in any normal auto store and buy small things like headlights and spark plugs. so if anyone could help me out please i would be very grateful.

You would be better served my modding H9 bulbs to use in you low beams, more power=more light. Then you can just order PIAA bulbs off Amazon or whatever, IMHO

You would be better served my modding H9 bulbs to use in you low beams, more power=more light.

Sweet, for my money--none better than PIAA. You can buy cheaper, but not better, IMHO

Thanks johnnyo. I love GREAT lights, but my quest for globes that I'd go nuts over is a long one. There's lots of cheap rubbish around, but great globes seem to be very subjective and expensive.

How do we do the H9 mod?

Hey C. Glad to help. A H11 globe typically produces 1350 lumins compared with the H9's 2100 lumins. When you look at the locating tangs on a H9 and H11 globe, they are almost the same. It is only the top tangs which are asymmetrically opposite. You just clip or buzz off the 3mm difference with side cutters or a dremel saw etc. On the inside of the plug socket, there is one locating tab that is different also. You just cut it off with a knife/chisel. Then they are a direct swap. Modifying the globes took me about 5 mins + fitting. You now have H9 65W globes on your low beam, instead of H11 55W.
If any of this doesn't make sense, just pm me and I'll happily walk you through it. Alternatively, Google H9 H11 Mod.

* Last updated by: sweetfa65 on 7/10/2014 @ 10:24 PM *

The images were cut and pasted from another site.

* Last updated by: sweetfa65 on 7/10/2014 @ 9:50 PM *

Just an FYI.....I only removed tab in socket, didn't mod lug, went right in....

Thank you! I'm gonna try this before the trip!

I researched PIAA lights for my bike before deciding to go HID. I used candlepowerforums for my basis.

All of the bulbs claiming to give "extra white" or "ultra white" or "whiter" (etc.) light are to be avoided. They are as close to fraudulent as can be without going over the line into illegally deceptive marketing practices. The blue glass they use blocks a substantial amount of light that would reach the road if the glass were clear, reducing the driver's ability to see. The light is not "whiter", it is actually bluer -- though it may wind up still within the legal white boundary or over the line into what is legally considered blue, depending on the depth of the blue tint. The tinted light does not help you see better under any conditions. These are purely stylistic gimmicks and should be avoided.

Better choices are Philips Xtreme Power, GE Night Hawk Platinum, or Osram Night Breaker.

Are you guys sure that Phillips Xtreme power bulb is brighter than PIAA bulb?

Yes. Also, the filament focus and build quality are far better on the Philips than on the PIAA. What makes you think three of us might be telling you lies? And what kind of car are you working on, by the way?

It isn't, actually. Certain kinds of bulbs (the "extra white" type with blue glass) produce less light than certain other kinds of bulbs (the high performance varieties with uncolored glass). That's just basic physics. Some brands of bulbs (including PIAA) have a long track record of poor build quality -- improper/imprecise filament geometry, etc. Some other brands of bulbs (Philips, Osram, GE) have a long track record of good build quality. Good-quality bulbs producing more light will always produce better headlight beam performance than poor-quality bulbs producing less light. There isn't a way around this; it's not subject to opinion.

Visual Representation

If color doesn't matter to you. Your best/cheapest bet is to do the H9 swap with Osram night breakers. If your dead set on a color, HID is the way to go, by the time you buy two sets of PIAA's you've paid for a set of coremoto HIDs.

There is no life expectancy for car bulbs. There is rated lifespan, which often bears no relationship to actual longevity but can be used for comparison purposes.

Regular H11: 1000 hrs (B3), 2000 hrs (Tc)
H11 Night Breaker, the best-performing H11 on the market: 100hrs (b3), 180 hrs (Tc)
H9: 250 hrs (B3), 500 hrs (Tc)

Reminder, B3 is the hour figure at which 3% of the test lot has failed. Tc is the hour figure at which 63.2% of the test lot has failed. Figures are at 13.2v.

Great info johnnyo and Fatsix. I've done loads of net-cruising too, trying to find some finite answer to what is best. You end up chasing your ass round in circles and confusing yourself. It seems to be quite subjective, with all sides being able to isolate some scientific argument for why their opinion is the correct one. Quality H9 globes are a little harder to find. I have the H9 Philips fitted to high and low at the moment. I noticed a very obvious improvement, but it goes without saying that a brighter burning globe is not going to outlast a duller one. H9 upgrades should be done with that in mind. There are also those who argue that the HIDs are not as "focused" beam pattern as halogens. Maybe it depends on the manufacturer? How do you like your HIDs Fatsix, compared to the standard H11 halogen for beam intensity and focus? It would be much easier if you could line up 5 or 6 bikes, all with headlight "upgrades", and pick the one you like the most.
Here's some more crap to read.

The new NightBreaker bulbs are not quite as good as the Philips Xtreme Power in terms of raw light output, but the difference is almost unmeasurable and certainly imperceptible in terms of actual headlamp performance. The Osram Night Breaker has areas of blue glass which take away from your seeing performance, rather than augmenting it as the promotional material claims—so-called "whiter" light created by blue filtration like this does not help you see better—so purely on performance, the Xtreme Power wins. Both of these bulbs have the best available output from a standard-wattage bulb, and a short lifespan
(no free lunch). For stock or near-stock wattage bulbs in headlamps, the best beam performance comes from the following bulbs:

H1: Philips Xtreme Power
H3: Narva Rangepower+50
H4: Osram 70/65w +50
H7: Osram 65w
H11: Substitute H9

Best-pick differs for other applications (fog lamps, etc.) and I don't mean to say the Night Breakers are bad bulbs, it's just Osram kind of got painted into a corner by Philips' minimal use of blue glass in their premium Xtreme Power line, and figured they had to make a bulb that looked significantly different to avoid a "me too" perception, so they cast their lot with larger use of blue glass and revved up the hype machine about "whiter" light.

As for the various "plus" claims (+30, +50, +80, +90, etc.) keep in mind how they're devised. The plus-numbers cannot be attained simply through greater luminous flux, because of flux and wattage restrictions contained in bulb regulations prevailing worldwide. The "Plus" bulbs do produce near the maximum allowable flux but that's obviously not the whole story. These bulbs have higher filament luminance and give better beam focus because the filament coilitself is smaller. Headlamp optics are calculated based on a point source. The smaller the filament, the more closely it approximates a point source, and therefore the better the focus of the resultant beam pattern. The better the focus of the beam pattern, the higher the beam peak intensity (that is, the brighter the "hot spot"). Depending on the particular bulb and the specific headlamp optic in use, the gain in hot spot intensity can indeed be up to 50% (80%, 90%, whatever) at some specific but not uniform or predictable point in the beam. In practice, that means once Osram or Philips or whoever have designed their newest bulb, they throw the nearest convenient intern in a room with a bunch of headlamps and have him photometer them until the one that gives the single greatest increase (at any point in the beam!) is found, then they give the intern a food pellet as a reward. Tungsram called their 2nd-generation upgrade H4 "+60" either because they were lying or because they found a headlamp for a 1983 Tatra or something that had 60% more light in one particular spot. That doesn't mean the Tungsram "+60" H4 was better than the "+50" bulbs from Philips, Osram, and Narva—it wasn't! So, those "+30" and "+50" and "+80" type numbers are not necessarily a trick or a scam, it just doesn't mean what most people assume it means.

As for the blue glass, here's a refresher on the science:

There is no magical blue absorption filter that somehow blocks less light than other blue absorption filters of the same colour
characteristics. All of the extra light from the "plus" bulb construction and then some is stolen by blue filter glass, whether the blue filter is made by Philips or Osram or one of the less-reputable factories.

Filament bulbs that have been filtered to produce "whiter" (colder/bluer) light colour, and which comply with DOT or ECE regulations, can be classified in two categories:

A) The kind that produces less light than an unfiltered bulb and has rather a shorter lifespan

B) The kind that produces almost the same amount of light as an unfiltered bulb and has an extremely short lifespan.

There are no "extra white" filtered bulbs that produce identical lumens to an unfiltered bulb and have the same lifespan

Glowing filaments produce a great deal of light in the red-orange-yellow-green wavelengths, and only very little light in the blue-violet wavelengths. To put very rough numbers on the matter, suppose that a 9006 bulb produces its nominal 1000 lumens, of which 250 are red, 250 are orange, 250 are yellow, 175 are green, 50 are blue and 25 are
violet.

Now, suppose you want to add a filter to the glass that makes the light look bluer/colder. How does it do that? Well, there's no such thing as a filter that adds light into the beam passing through it -- filters can only suppress light, not add it. So if we can't add green-blue-violet light, then the only way to get the light to look colder is to suppress green-blue-violet's opposites, which are red-orange-yellow. If we want the light to look, let's say, 20% colder, we suppress red-orange-yellow by 20%. Looking up above, we see that we've got a total of 750 lumens' worth of red, orange and yellow. So, cutting this by 20% leaves 600 lumens, plus essentially all of the bulb's original green-blue-violet output of 250 lumens, so we've now got a bulb that produces light that looks 20% colder and produces 850 lumens.

Now, 850 lumens happens to be the minimum legal output for a 9006. Unless we're a completely stinky Chinese company that really doesn't give a rat's patoot about it, we can't produce a bulb that produces only the bare minimum of light, because 50% of production will be 849 lumens or less owing to the realities of mass production. So, we have to put in a high-luminance filament to try to counteract some of the filtering losses. BUT we still have to come in under the max-allowable-wattage spec in DOT or ECE regulations.

So, let's say we build our 9006 with a super-duper filament that produces 1200 lumens. That's too much for a 9006, but we're going to take away some of those lumens with our filter-glass. This 1200-lumen filament produces, let's say, 300 lumens red, 300 lumens orange, 300 lumens yellow, 210 lumens green, 60 lumens blue and 30 lumens violet. Now we put that
same blue glass over it, which suppresses red-orange-yellow by 20%. Now we've got 720 lumens' worth of red-orange-yellow after filtration, plus 300 lumens' worth of green-blue-violet. That gives us a 910-lumen bulb, which is enough above the 850-lumen legal "floor" that we can mass-produce the bulb and even if some filaments only produce 1150 lumens instead of
1200, we're still legally OK. Of course, we still only have 910 lumens instead of 1000, and our 1200-lumen filament is going to have a significantly shorter life than a 1000-lumen filament, but we've got our colder/bluer light appearance in a legal bulb.

I bet by now you see why filtering for yellow does not significantly reduce light output: Take our 1000-lumen 9006 as broken down by colour output above. No such thing as a filter that adds extra yellow light, so we have to get our yellow by suppressing blue-violet (the particular yellow that yellow headlamp/foglamp bulbs produce, called "selective
yellow", contains all the green found in white light. If we took out some of the green, we'd have a turn signal type of amber-orange light.) OK, then, let's cut blue-violet by 80%. That means we've got our 925 lumens' worth of red-orange-yellow-green, plus 15 lumens' worth of blue-violet (after filtration). Total: 940 lumens. MUCH smaller loss! OK, so we put in a very slightly better filament, say one that produces 1060 lumens, and now we've got 980 lumens' worth of red-orange-yellow-green, plus 16 lumens' worth of blue-violet (after filtration) for a total of 996 lumens, which is for all intents and purposes identical to our original 1000-lumen uncoloured bulb (a parking light bulb puts out between 25 and 50 lumens).

Lumen output is less than standard for colourless-glass Long Life bulbs for a different reason: The changes made to the filament to extend its life reduce its surface luminance, decreasing light output and CCT. They also defocus the beam pattern, resulting in shorter seeing distance, because the filament coil is larger. This is exactly opposite what's going on with the +30, +50, +80 type bulbs as described above.

* Last updated by: sweetfa65 on 7/17/2014 @ 5:58 PM *

Hey I know this is an older post but.....is anyone still doing this mod? Cutting the tab off the bulb to fit into the socket?

Yes