How to fabricate a LED pilotlight bulb or

or more simple: pointless electrickery.

Imagine the following situation, you have a pretty worn out pilotlight socket and because the alternator on your sidecar isn't exactly the strongest in the world, you decide to ride around on the pilotlight a lot during the day to charge the battery quicker, when you're only riding around in the city at low revs. Now a while ago, I bought a sh*tload of LEDs with push-in sockets, because that's what I use for instrument lights on my various bikes. Unfortunately my pilot light needs a proper bayonett-socket.

In order to make the original LED ba9s bulb fit, I had to grind it down in various dimensions. It would go through the hole, but touch the reflector and as such would increase the likelihood of a bad contact and or the bulb falling out, when it was pushed in.

This is one of the new LED bulbs. I bought two sets, one of this more traditional kind, with an acrylic reflector on top of it and a more modern version with just a cob, which are A LOT brighter. Also the orange dot marks which one of the leads is plus as LEDs are diodes and thus can't be hooked up either way.

Next up was a bit of lathe-work to make the actual "cup" for the led. I wanted it to be a tide slide-fit into the orifice on the reflector, so I wouldn't have to use a rubber o-ring or something along those lines for retention.

After drilling the cups and doing a testfit, they were filled with hot-glue to hold the LEDs and also give them some rigidity.

I also made sure, that the short bits of original wire and the soldering were inside the cup and the hotglue should prevent the short bits of wire from breaking off right at the board. 

And that's what it looks like, when it is installed.

The picture only does it insufficient justice. The cob-pilot light is so bright, I think I might have owned 6V-bikes in the past with a weaker mainbeam on the headlight. Of course it's not as focussed, but it was enough to see what's going on in the garage at night, with all other lights turned off. From a time-is-money point of view, it was a completely pointless endeavour of course. Such bulbs can be bought for (at the most) ten Euros and I easily spent an entire Saturday morning making the bits (let alone considering the fact that the POM-bar I turned to cups from wasn't free either. It certainly solved a problem I had, so it was worth it in the end for me. The thing I am still somewhat wondering about is, will heat-dissipation of the LED-cob become an issue? Only time will tell.