Halo and Projector headlights

[97PROSHOZ71]

That Sierra looks sweet!

 

[94shortbed]

i have mine hooked up through the factory wiring harness. never had any issue up until now

 

[Daddie2k3]

Wow I don't know what to say because it sound like a big electronical problem but I would start troubleshooting by replacing Hids with factory 9006 and see what it does and do you have anything extra connected straight to the battery

 

[1BadBowtie]

I don't quite understand the question, but all you have to do is plug the white connector to your stock 9006 plug in, and the positive and negative wires go to the h1 bulb. The red wire goes directly to the h1 bulb, and the ground wire goes to a ground placed on the headlight it self.

Which Projector lights do you have? Are yours smoked or black?

 

[JParker2012]

Which Projector lights do you have? Are yours smoked or black?

My projectors were just the chrome ones. That was on my NBS though, I don't have projectors on my GMT 400. Ha ha

 

[1BadBowtie]

I like your 98 btw. Id like to do tinted or black headlights I just don't know whats good and what to look for.

P.S. Are trucks are brother and sister. Look at the color combo.

 

[JParker2012]

I like your 98 btw. Id like to do tinted or black headlights I just don't know whats good and what to look for.

P.S. Are trucks are brother and sister. Look at the color combo.

Ha ha yeah our trucks are brothers and good headlights are hard to come by on these trucks, but most of the eBay ones are garbage

 

[great white]

eBay lights are indeed crap. At least as delivered.

I bought a set specifically to tear apart for the clear lenses. So I searched out the ones with the lowest price, although they're all the same chunks of plastic from the same manufacturer. "solar" or something like that...

They were projector lenses in the low beams and standard reflector high beams.

All the eBay lights that are projectors are halogen projectors. Meaning; hid bulbs in them are crap. The focal lengths are all wrong, by that I mean completely wrong.

Compounding this is that if you use the halogen bulbs the light output is still crap. The lenses are thin and the optics are extremely poor (hence: cheap price). You can tell that someone just cast a piece of glass that looks like a projector lens rather than making one that actually IS a projector lens. Chuck on top of that the focal lengths of the housings are all wrong for even halogen use.

I hacked them right out of the housing and installed a set of Acura TSX projector housings with D2S capsules.

The reflector high beams are nearly useless with either halogen bulbs or capsules. I threw some cheap conversion capsules in them and they don't even reach 1/4 as far as my low beams. Useless. I mainly use the high beams to catch the reflectors on road signs above the projectors low beam cutoff, because pointless for anything else.

The base for the lights (part that bolts to the radiator support panel) is very thin and poorly reinforced. This lets the lights "flop around" and vibrate constantly. I tossed the bases in the crapper and used the much thicker OEM bases on the original lights.

The frame around the light housings is also crap. Very thin and poorly braced. They also allow the lights to flop and bobble around. A lot of it is where the 2 long bolts that hold the headlight frame to the base is waaay over-sized to keep everything properly aligned. I wrapped the bolts in some cellophane, threaded them into the frame and filled the void with JB weld. Not a stitch of wobble now. You have to make sure you have the parts properly aligned though or the headlights won't fit the grill properly.

The adjusters are also total crap. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, sometimes they strip or sometimes they just move around however/whenever they feel like it. I ripped all the cheap "Ching Ching" pieces off and installed the adjusters from the OEM housings. Much better.

I also built my own wiring harness complete with relays and a "4Hi" arrangement, Although I did it a little differently. 12 and 10 gauge wiring plus associated connectors and I did away with the OEM wires (too long, too undersized and too old) by tapping the headlight signal directly from the switch and a main relay under the hood to eliminate the high power draw going through both the dash switch and the tiny contacts in the multifunction switch. The 40A relay for the lows is feed directly from the battery as is the highs. It all looks like so:

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The black relays are the headlight relays. The 60A megafuse feeds them. There's a bit more going on there but that's the stuff for the lights....

You want to do the 4HI wiring for the reasons "sewlow" mentioned, not because it "looks cool". When you go from high to low and back again, you will have a few seconds of no light at all while the capsules warm up. Problem is the bulbs turning off snap off immediately and then you've got a 2-5 second delay while the capsules coming on get up to full intensity. The first 2 secs are totally black. At highway speeds, that's half a football field before you have light again....not good.

As mentioned, i bought the eBay lights mainly to get the clear lenses. Using HID's in stock fluted lenses is just a waste as he fluted lenses are designed to diffuse the beam instead of letting it all travel forward. Not what you want with HIDs, it just leads to glare and even shorter projection at night...

So, after all was said and done I had about 4 packages of JB quick, a set of TSX projectors and associated ballasts/wiring/capsules, and a bit of wiring upgrade into it.

But, I also have low beams that reach further and wider than any HID conversion or stock bulb could every dream about, no flicker or color shift and lights that fit to the OEM grill openings as good as (or better) than the stockers......

 

[sewlow]

So what's the dif between a 9006 & an H10?

GW...I agree with what you said about the focal length, but is there a solution for modding the existing housings to work properly, other than hacking up a set of lights to add the TSX housings such as you did? I've had 35mm SLR cameras in my hands since I was 13, so I understand the concept. Just don't have the mathematical solution to figure this out. Is it even possible to mod the stock style housings into atleast the ballpark of where the bulbs would work as they should?
I have a set of housings that I've been working on to swap out the 9006's to 9004's. Do you think that this is even worth the effort?

Got pix of your lights? Both on your truck & the light output that they produce. I read in your build thread about how you were doing this, but I can't remember seeing the final results.

 

[great white]

So what's the dif between a 9006 & an H10?

GW...I agree with what you said about the focal length, but is there a solution for modding the existing housings to work properly, other than hacking up a set of lights to add the TSX housings such as you did?

Not really. Better off to just graft in a proper set of projector housings and be done with it.

I've had 35mm SLR cameras in my hands since I was 13, so I understand the concept. Just don't have the mathematical solution to figure this out. Is it even possible to mod the stock style housings into atleast the ballpark of where the bulbs would work as they should?

doubtful. The housing isn't made for HID capsules and the lens is only a piece of cheap glass. It's not really a "lens" at all, just made to look like one. When I pulled them out, each one was different in thickness so you know there's no QA in the manufacturing process.

You'll get light out of them, just what kind/quality of light is the question.

Let me try and put it another way using your camera analogy: if the focus is not exactly right, what do you get? A fuzzy, out of focus picture. Almost like looking at something through rice paper or underwater. "ballpark" doesn't cut it, you have to get it right or the incoming light is scattered and you get a fuzzy pic.

That's exactly what's happening to the light your bulb produces when the focal length is wrong in the housing and the lens is crap except the light is going out of the assembly instead of into it like the camera. You get fuxxy spread out light that goes places that isn't going to do anything for you except take away from the lumens you can put downrange onto the target.

(FYI; I use a D2Xs, wife is a pro photographer and uses a D3X. I get to use the D2 because it's her "hand me down". My truck pics are usually just iphone because it's handy)

I even tried running them with the halogens in them for a couple nights while I was waiting for time to pull them apart. They were worse than the stock yellowed light. yeah, pretty much crap.

My preference is to know what I'm getting, hence grafting in the high quality OEM Acura units. It's actually a pretty common swap to use TSX projectors in retrofits. The lenses and manufacturing QA is pretty high quality for an automotive application and they are (were?) readily available.

I have a set of housings that I've been working on to swap out the 9006's to 9004's. Do you think that this is even worth the effort?

Not trying to be "flip", but your guess is as good as mine. The diff is pretty much just the style of base and dual filaments IIRC.....don't quote me on that though.

Got pix of your lights? Both on your truck & the light output that they produce. I read in your build thread about how you were doing this, but I can't remember seeing the final results.

No light pattern pics, but I've got some of them mounted on the truck somewhere. Not much to look at, just some projector looking lights...

Edit:

here's a couple while they were "in progress":

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The picture was actually taken for the bumper which was also in progress at the time.

They're still a little crooked in that pic, the right one especially. I had yet to align them and jb quick the bolts holding them in place. They're even with and to the opening now.

If I had it to do over, I probably would have done a set of chrome interior ones instead of the black. I was thinking black would be easier to fix if the interior got messed up during the retrofit, but I've always been back and forth on whether or not I like them...