ZPD said:
I was looking briefly at those Sylvania Silver star. Are they any good?
I was over at Mike Rollins' house a couple of weekends ago. Together, (he did most of the work) we made up three wiring harnesses to upgrade the headlights in our rigs.
Mike's work was fantastic. He used terminal blocks mounted to the inner fender just below the hood prop. The hot side attached to the battery connection of the fuse block via a fuse and the ground went to the same bolt as the regular chassis ground. All connections were crimped, soldered and heat shrinked. The long wire runs were twisted and encased in wire loom that looks like Chinese finger torture netting.
The triggers were soldered to the old headlight connectors and new connectors were wired. The only available headlight connectors had 16 gauge pigtails so we had remove the brass connector from the plastic housing, uncrimp them, discard the pigtails so that we could reuse the connectors with 12 gauge wire.
Once everything was connected, we plugged in the relays, popped in the fuse and installed the headlights into the new connectors. The old connectors remained alongside. Should I ever need or want to pull the harness, all I have to cut is the two trigger wires, pull the harness out and plug the headlights back into the old harness.
It's such a clean install, you wouldn't believe...
Photos of harness wiring
Voltage at the connector jumped from 11.7 to 13.6 volts; a gain of almost two volts!
I bought Sylvania Silverstars online at <http://www.sylvania.com/auto/silverstar.htm>, but noticed that Pep Boys has them on sale this week.
The Silverstars, at 60/70 watts, are marginally brighter than a street legal H4, 55/60 lamp. However, with the new harness, I had a hard time discerning any difference between my lights' output and a Beemer's HID lights as we drove side-by-side down the freeway. There was no difference in the color temp, as both were glaringly white. The Beemer did have a more focused beam (beam... Beemer... I say, pay attenshun son!) but that's a function of the reflector.
I installed them last week and even without the new harness, the increase in light output and whiteness was dramatic. The Silverstars are a regular sealed beam headlight so the swap takes only five minutes. These are great headlights, even without the harness.
The low beams do seem to shed some light to the sides. I find that a benefit not a disadvantage. I think headlights that do that are called cornering lights while headlights that focus all the light straight in front are termed driving lights. Frankly, I like the compromise beam of the Silverstars.