In these modern times of efficiency, performance and streamlining, do you really need eight inches of lighting power for your dual-sport or enduro? Don’t be surprised if seven inches does the job. Doing more with less is the ultimate goal for many, and Trail Tech went to the moon with this one.

If you want an 8″ halogen race light to put out nearly 5,000 lumens, you’re conservatively looking at 100 watts to power it. The Trail Tech 7″ LED Headlight? Only 27 watts. Lumens measure light volume, not intensity, so the 7″ LED Headlight putting out 4,700 retina-scorching lumens actually has greater intensity than an eight-inch unit of the same rating.

Of course, you can’t just throw huge amounts of light down the road and hope for the best—reflector design is responsible for directing light in the most usable way. The Trail Tech 7″ LED has a mediumsized hot spot, and most of the light from all three LEDs is focused here, so it’s extremely bright and farreaching. Much tighter and the hot spot would be too small—much wider and it wouldn’t let you keep your speed up at night. The flood gets progressively dimmer, but I rarely found it lacking.

After sunset, the light easily let me hold a comfortable speed on dirt roads, because any deer you can’t see in the bushes you wouldn’t see in the daytime. In open terrain, I didn’t feel like I outrode the light, even at 70 mph+. The tricky thing about fork-mounted lights is when you’re pushing through corners with the back end out, they don’t always point where you need to look—the only situations where I found myself wanting a more flood-like beam pattern.

Everything you need to set up the 7″ LED light comes in the box. Battery connections, an inline fuse, waterproof connectors and push-button switch are all ready to rock on any bike with 9–32 volts of DC power. The light itself is rated IP67 for waterproofness, and so far the self-serve pressure washers haven’t done any harm.

The improvement over my stock XR650L headlight with an HID bulb is so astronomical, it almost feels like cheating because it’s so easy to install and wire up. Give the Trail Tech 7″ LED Headlight a try, and give the Greek god Helios a run for his money. Seriously. It’s that bright.

We’re continuing to test the 7″ LED on our Honda XR650L project bike, so stay tuned with ADVMoto for a full write-up on that project as well! MSRP: $349.95 TrailTech.net

Note: This light doesn’t have a DOT-compliant reflector and hi-low beam option, so it might not be fully street-legal where you live.

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