What seem like “expensive” quality LED light bars are not overpriced, once you’ve done the analysis and tried to create your own. In fact, they are a bargain that I have yet to see anyone DYI and beat.
Over time, a few friends and I evaluated around 40 cheap Chinese off road LED light bars and housings, with the idea of converting and reselling them in large quantity. After testing and discovering horrendous stock results, we disassembled the housings to consider using them as mod hosts. We found them ALL to be of extremely poor quality and design, with a complete lack of craftsmanship, quality and QC. Many of the LED MCPCB’s didn’t even make contact with the fake flimsy heat sinks, or made limited contact. They all had trashy baked-in drivers delivering >60% rated power, while struggling to illuminate dingy blue Chinese emitters someone probably recovered during a dumpster dive. Even after extensive modification, they still lacked sufficient mass, surface area and contact area to provide sufficient heat sinking. Just as bad were the ultra low quality reflector grids that were practically useless in directing any sort of discernible beam pattern. They all scattered light with odd mixed beam patterns, heavy artifacts & useless hot spots going in every direction. There was utterly nothing that could be used or salvaged in a “proposed production mid-quality high-powered build”. A few tear down’s that seemed like great mod host candidates required a large precision band saw to carefully dissect them. More abysmal design failures… and into the recycle bin they went! SUCH A WASTE OF TIME AND ALL HUGE DISAPPOINTMENTS! It later dawned on me that most of the extremely shabby assembly work must have been completed by child forced slave labor, which is when I gave up.
I had started my own LED light bar build as a test platform but took a different direction, instead converting three large Hella Rallye 4000 competition housings to 100 watt HID’s. It was a quick and clean mod to an existing high quality installation. They provide a very wide even beam with great range, free from beam artifacts, with excellent cut-off and more illumination than I can reasonably use (24K lumens). Total cost: around $600. I had already gained years of trouble-free service in their stock 100 watt halogen form, which was before the advent of high lumen LED and HID. And they provide the right vintage look for my old Toyota 4 x 4. They are still in production and selling well.
I’ll get back to the LED light bar build some day and I have made some recent progress (swapped to elliptical beam TIR’s with beam cut-off and started machining the enormous heat sink). Here’s my old build thread if you’d like to take a look:
DIY Light Bar - 40 x XM-L2 on copper
In researching what it will cost to complete my light bar (all-in) verses buying one of similar performance and beam characteristics, I will be in the hole at least $150, if not more. That still doesn’t consider my time, nor will it be as water resistant, fog free or attractive as a quality factory light bar. You really do get what you pay for, and the investment is justified IF you play off road OFTEN FOR LONG HOURS after dark. If not, you are wasting your money.
If you’re patient, you can find deals on Rigid, Baja Designs, Rough Country, etc. And believe me, most of those are thoroughly engineered to last and perform at a great price… compared to the alternate. Of course, do your own research and read plenty of reviews for each particular model before purchasing. Many good deals are old stock with old generation emitters (ie: XM-L vs XM-L2, etc.) and low power drivers, compared to the same upgraded models with modern emitters and high powered drivers, so be very careful what you buy.
Sorry for the long post…