MaxxXJ
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Bakersfield CA
Imma do the hid " hack job " with my lights . Shop I know will hook me up for a complete set housings and all for less than $150
You don't have a HID retrofit, you have an unsafe/illegal HID hack job.
Who pooped in your cheerios? Would you like a hug? I can't see at night, its a temporary solution. Sorry i don't want to spend my money to do a proper retrofit right now.
While you are at it.., get some head lamp stone guards to protect those expensive glass lense upgrades.
So you can't afford HIDs, take them out and run stock lights until you can afford the HIDs. With stock lights you will not be blinding everyone else and you will have actual usable light. Don't tell me stock lights are unusable either, millions of vehicles use those same sealed beams and people do just fine with them. If you want to upgrade that is great, I upgraded to IPF housings, I upgraded when I could afford to.
I get tired of hearing people cry they can't afford something and use that as an excuse for doing hack jobs. If you came on here touting 5" lift blocks it would go over grandly I am sure.
I did a real HID conversion on my other car for about $200 using the Morimoto mini bi-xenon projectors and the DDM tuning HID kit + ebay housings. It is possible to do it correctly on reasonable budget, and it works well.
It is not possible to do it politely without a projector housing. I can only conclude that the people on all these forums who say their headlights are "aimed right" and "don't get them flashed" are the same assholes who blind me driving around with their "HID retrofit". Sorry to rant, but i'd hate for another one of those to be born as a result of the misinformation given.
Euro housings + good bulbs will get you most of the way to an HID output for less money, without being inconsiderate to other drivers (though more amperage draw, if that's a concern).
Perhaps you missed the part about them BEING AIMED PROPERLY! I even aimed them lower than when I had stock bulbs in them. Lose the attitude about it dude or GTFO! :conceited
Daniel Stern Lighting said:The most dangerous part of the attempt to "retrofit" Xenon headlamps is that sometimes you get a deceptive and illusory "improvement" in the performance of the headlamp. The performance of the headlamp is perceived to be "better" because of the much higher level of foreground lighting (on the road immediately in front of the car). However, the beam patterns produced by this kind of "conversion" virtually always give less distance light, and often an alarming lack of light where there's meant to be a relative maximum in light intensity. The result is the illusion that you can see better than you actually can, and that's not safe.
Stern's job is to sell people expensive lighting gear, and to make them feel like the cost is justified. While he's very good at that, not everyone is interested in $300-400 halogen setups. I don't think people are defensive, so much as annoyed when anonymous people on their forum tell them their lights are shit, because a salesman told them that only expensive lighting works.
The Retrofit Source said:What is a Retrofit?
Power is nothing without control. Installing HID kits into halogen headlights is dangerous, doesn't work well, and annoying to oncoming traffic. Retrofitting is the process of installing a xenon or bi-xenon projector into a reflector based halogen headlight. It is the best HID headlight upgrade possible since the projector will control the light into a properly dispersed, non glaring beam pattern.
The Retrofit Source said:When installing a plug n play HID kit, the "rebased" HID bulb that comes with the kit will fit in the socket where your halogen bulb went, but the HID capsule in the bulb will be aligned differently in the reflector compared to the position of the original halogen filament. The result? An unfocused beam pattern with no horizontal light cutoff line. Your headlights may be brighter, but your usable light output may actually be worse. Approximately 50% of the light emitted from the headlights is being reflected up into the air, not on the ground where it should be. As a matter of fact, users of HID kits are one of the biggest contributing factors to the negative reputation that HID headlights have. HID plug n play kits produce so much glare, which is not only annoying to oncoming traffic and other drivers in front of you, but they're also dangerous because the possibility of temporarily blinding an oncoming driver and causing an accident.
wiki said:Vehicles equipped with HID headlamps are required by ECE regulation 48 also to be equipped with headlamp lens cleaning systems and automatic beam levelling control. Both of these measures are intended to reduce the tendency for high-output headlamps to cause high levels of glare to other road users. In North America, ECE R48 does not apply and while lens cleaners and beam levellers are permitted, they are not required; HID headlamps are markedly less prevalent in the US, where they have produced significant glare complaints. Scientific study of headlamp glare has shown that for any given intensity level, the light from HID headlamps is 40% more glaring than the light from tungsten-halogen headlamps.
Stern's job is to sell people expensive lighting gear, and to make them feel like the cost is justified. While he's very good at that, not everyone is interested in $300-400 halogen setups. I don't think people are defensive, so much as annoyed when anonymous people on their forum tell them their lights are shit, because a salesman told them that only expensive lighting works.
"Pair of Cibie replaceable-bulb headlamp units (best-focused,
most-efficient units in production), Part number 82440
$74.95/ea without built-in parking lamp or part number 82438
$75.95/ea with built-in parking lamp.
Custom-built relay harness, ready to install, part number
HARN-RIK2, $139
Bulbs, Osram 70/65w, part number 64205, $22/ea.
Optional: Bulbs, front sidemarker light, 60% brighter, part
number WX6W, $4.24/ea."
I'll look into the morimoto stuff, did you use the "clear" lenses or the fluted ones? I honestly spent some time aiming mine down so people didnt get pissed at me, It seems to have worked. That and I only have 5000k bulbs instead of the 14987987987k purple ones. I have spent a lot of time and money on my Jeep, its far fomr done and a retrofit is on the list. I hardly drive my Jeep at night as it is, so these will work.
The hardest part is making sure you have enough room behind your headlight mount for the projector--even the morimoto mini's are (IIRC) 5 3/4" deep + another 1/2" for the bulb and pigtail.