If you're like many who have auxiliary lighting to augment the pathetic headlights on your ST1100, you probably have the PIAA 910's that shine with a fairly narrow focused beam. These are great lights for wide open country with relatively light traffic such as the desert southwest but in my mind their use leaves a bit to be desired in the rest of the country where there is a lot of traffic and the sides of the roads are filled with trees and brush populated by deer and other critters. For the part of the country where I live, I need a light that has a broader beam than the 910 that will better illuminate the sides of the road. For this task I settled on a pair of PIAA 1200's. Buying them was the easy part. Mounting them was definitely the hard part.

At first I considered just screwing them to the underside of the mirror covers since they were so light. I later changed my mind when I looked closely at the way they would hang. I definitely wanted the 1200's to be mounted below the mirror covers so my only choice was to mount them somehow with metal brackets. No one makes a mounting bracket for the PIAA 1200 like they do for the 910 so I was forced to make my own. My effort at bracket manufacturing began with acquiring the raw material needed. Somehow I needed to get my hands on angled aluminum that was about 3" by 2". None of the large discount hardware stores had anything like this, nor did any of the smaller stores. After hunting around for several weeks, I happened to mention my dilemma to a riding buddy and as it turned out, he had some scrap channel aluminum that was about 3" x 5". He was good enough to give me some of his stash. Using nothing but a hacksaw and a drill, I fashioned a couple of brackets out of this stuff.

After mounting the first bracket on my bike, it became clear that the material I was using just wasn't rigid enough, so back to the drawing board I went. My friend, who is very talented mechanically, suggested that I double up on the material. I did this by riveting two of the brackets together. Finding the rivets turned out to be quite a chore as none of the big chain hardware stores carried the rivets that you install with a hammer. I guess no one uses them anymore. I finally found some at a small, old fashioned type hardware store that is known for carrying things that the larger chains don't handle. See the pictures below for the final product.

Picture of the left bracket. Notice the 3 rivets as well as the two holes for attaching the Piaa's. The dimensions are roughly 3" x 2" x 2".

Left bracket from another angle showing one of the rivets and the hole for attaching the bracket to the bike.

Left bracket attached to the bike with Piaa attached (prior to painting). A small length of 3/4" box shaped aluminum was used as a spacer between the bracket and where it mounted to the mirror mount.

Left bracket from another angle

Once the brackets were made, it was time to run the wiring. This turned out to be WAY more trouble than making the brackets. There's just not a whole lot of room left under the tupperware. I already have a lot of auxiliary electrical circuits running all over the place. Finding room for even more was a challenge. After that was done, all that remained was to paint the brackets, install them, mount the switch, then modify the mirror covers to accommodate the brackets. Below are some pictures of the cut mirror cover, as well as the finished product mounted on the bike and the switch location.

Mirror cover showing the cut out for the brackets. I used masking tape as a surface to make pencil marks for the slot that needed to be cut. I then used a hacksaw blade and a dremel tool to make the cut.

Left side Piaa mounted on black painted bracket.