T’was youngest grandsons first birthday was last week. Son lives not too far away, but its down very narrow, rural, Lake district roads. Getting there was bad. Leaf covered and flooded roads in a lowered muscle car was tense. Getting back was a nightmare. It was the first time I’ve driven this car in the dark and the dipped lights were awful. I couldn’t see a thing. Lucky my tyres are so wide, I think they were half of the road at some points. I had to stop for every bend I met an oncoming car. Wife was having kittens.
I checked the dash cam footage for some interesting encounters, but the dash cam made it look like daylight and my driving bad. I can recommend the Viofo A129 Duo. I wonder if I can get it to display on the head unit over wifi? Latency might be a problem. Anyway, I thought it must be just old age creeping up. As soon as this farce is over I’ll get my eyes tested.
I decided to change the low beam bulbs for some Osram 65w Rally I had in. Firstly there was no dust cap on the passenger side low beam bulb, and after driving through the floods the headlight is badly misted up. Drivers side dust cap had a hole cut out with a metal cap forced into it. This promptly fell into the depths of the engine bay. Then I found the problem, cheap nasty LED bulbs. WHY….! To buy these headlight units from Vauxhall is £1500 each, why ruin them for the sake of some cheap eBay LED bulbs. The thing that concerns me is that the wires and connector had been neatly wrapped up in cloth tape, not something an amateur tends to keep in their tool box.
The drivers low beam dust cap was repaired with a piece of plastic I glued in. Then I realised it might get hot, so added some heat reflective tape. Managed to fit a piece of rubber over the hole for the passenger one, held in place by a large jubilee clip, for now. Dropped in a silica gel pack first, to help de-mist. Second-hand headlamp ordered off ebay, mainly for the dust cap, but I’ll try and get a good spare pair, considering the price of new ones. I remember when replacing a bulb in a car was a 2 minute job. This took me three hours and two 30/500 co-codamol.
Tell me about it. Old car with 4×6 bulbs in front, 5min to unscrew the bracket, pop the bulb, unplug, replug, replace the bulb, rescrew the bracket.
Newer car, pull up a pair of sliders, slide out the assembly, pop the dust cap, unplug, replace, replug, recap, slide in, replace sliders.
Newest car, use upholstery tools to unsnap the snappy things, remove big-ass ‘U’-shaped apron or at least lift up one corner out of the way… that’s about as far as I got. Was just doing it out of curiosity and thankfully not necessity.
A bulb pops, I’m in trouble.
When i bought my car 6 years ago, i immediately replaced the stock H4 bulbs with Philips H4 X-Treme vision, these are much brighter than the factory H4 bulbs.
Last year i replaced the Philips X-Treme with Philips Ultinon Essential Led bulbs. https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/4000167485180.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.27424c4dz5lYrI
These were brighter than the X-Treme, but because there is no active cooling (no fan) on these H4 bulbs they dim a lot when they heat up.
Another problem was the led-driver, it was very difficult to get it in the headlamp unit, i had to order longer dust caps to get them installed (leaving the back of the headlamp unit open is no option because water and dust wil eventually destroy the expensive headlamp unit).
Then i saw there was a new version of the Philips Ultinon Essential , the “Gen 2”. https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/4001135562690.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.27424c4deYSwa8
These have active cooling (fan) and the driver is built in the bulb.
I ordered a set of these (H4) and they are much easier to install, they don’t get dimmer because they heat up (they stay cooler with the fan), and the cut-off line (beam pattern) is a little bit sharper than with the first generation.
They are brighter than the X-Treme vision H4, but the low beam will not blind oncoming traffic because the light only gets to where it is supposed te be for a car headlight (on the ground, and not directly in the eyes of other road users).
The beam pattern is about the same as with halogen H4 bulbs, so far i had no complaints from oncoming traffic (no blinking headlights to me).