Monday 26 March 2018

LED Headlamps

Finished the wiring for the headlights, whether they are MOT legal or not is yet to be tested.

The LED headlight lamps I chose had a built in quirk that they would not light full beam and dip beam at the same time. My loom tried to illuminate both when on full beam - and for a long while I've just planned the fix.

The LED bulbs have deflectors for dip/main to move the light generation point appropriately for my lenses. LED pictured top using the same connector and a built in fan, high intensity halogen H4 bottom.


Two choices - dive into the fusebox again and adjust the headlight circuit or, what I decided on, a flying loom in the front of the car to cut the dip beam when full beam is on. The circuit is designed to be non-destructive by plugging into the existing loom and will still work with normal H4 bulbs:

Picked up on the same colour scheme as the existing loom with high enough gauge to also support normal bulbs, if the LEDS don't make it through MOT then I can simply revert the bulbs and leave this circuit in place.

My least favourite part of the car, I just can't seem to make it look tidy - the new flying loom plugs into one side of the headlight feed then connects to the headlight leads. The relay mounted to the existing horn attachment point.


Works well enough - the relay on the flying loom simply cuts power to dip when it sees main, no changes required to existing switches or fusebox, the dip pattern seems to work - although not completely visible on these pictures - horizontal top with a kick up to the near side.

Dip, Full beams, lenses themselves look like they need rotating to get a level output.

Next step is run the lights through an alignment test and confirm if I'm legal.
To be continued...

Update - Bigclive.com Youtube channel just did a teardown and explanation of these bulbs, bears our my experience with them not supporting main and dip on at the same time. Very interesting.

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