Archive of BMW Motorrad Club Cape (2006 - 2019)

I live and work in Century City and this place has loads of double lane roundabouts. Recently I have had a few close shaves round them and this has not been fun. The problem seems to be that on some of them, the entrance to the roundabout is very close to the next exit and sometimes almost coming in perpendicular to it.

What’s happened a few times now is that even though I am in the left lane, signalling to the take the left exit, I have a car entering the roundabout on my left that nearly side swipes me! They just seem to be assuming that I’m going to be continuing round the roundabout. As I take the exit they seem to be nearly on top of me!

I’ve realised as a result, that they clearly can’t see my indicators flashing from the side, especially in sun light. The indicators seem to shine perfectly well to the front and back but looking at my bike from the side, they are useless. This seems to be because the bulbs are recessed too deeply into the reflector housings and thus don’t show much to the side. Mine is a 2006 model RT and other models may well be different / better. Having been nearly side swiped a few times I decided to sort out this ‘design flaw’.

I began experimenting with homemade indicator repeater lights mounted on the side of my bike, which would hopefully solve the problem. I wanted them to look aesthetically good and also wanted to avoid any permanent alterations to the bike, like drilling holes in fairings etc.

I started with an LED strip light. I got a strip of yellow LED’s mounted on a black plastic strip from China Town at Sable Square. I stuck these on my side mirror and snuck the wires through the mirror and onto the indicator light. These look ok and work very well in relative darkness but they were useless in sun light. See photos below:

LED strip light in action - not bad in relative darkness

LED strip light on mirror

From another China Town shop, this time in Ottery, I got a ‘super-bright’ yellow LED strip. Better, but still pretty useless in sun light. I realised that LED strip lights were not going to solve my problem and I would need a ‘proper’, ‘normal’ bulb of some sorts.

I eventually found a side light holder, that doesn’t look too bad, and that can also be mounted flush on the body work, at Tonnesen’s in Claremont. I also upgraded the bulb from 5W to the max available: 10W.

I soldered some wires in, had to grind down a bit of the lens cap and the backing plate to get the wires through and attached some double sided tape. (Use the thin black stuff not the spongy white stuff). Stuck it on my fairing and voila, I think it looks and works fine. I’ll need to test it in the sun a bit more but so far so good. See photos below:

Side Lights 

Side Light

Wired up with a few mods

I also got some 3mm screws and nuts and counter sunk them into the backing plate.

Side View

In action

The 'normal' indicators shown working above are nearly invisible in sun light.

The side lights cost about R40 for the pair and the extra bulbs about R15. It’s a pity one can’t get much bigger than 10W bulbs, but the challenge may also be that they over heat, so I’ll keep an eye on that.