Yes, I run a pair of hella 450 yellow fog lights with 100w bulbs in them. The 55w did not have enough oommmpph to them to cut through the pea soup we have here, the 100w do the job perfectly. I also installed a set of nokya yellow bulbs in my factory fog lights and they work surprisingly well. I run the hella 500 driving beam with 55w HID for clear night time driving. I have them hooked to my high beam trigger to keep from blinding oncoming drivers. works the bees knees and are a great lighting solution and at a great price.
Looking to add driving lights - Your likes & dislikes.
- Thread starter Joanne
- Start date
Hilldweller
SE Expedition Society
They don't weigh much and are durable. Those are the nicest things I can say about Lightfarce.
Hilldweller
SE Expedition Society
Dan doesn't sell my favorite lights... ...and he doesn't particularly like Trucklite Phase 7s....
He's my mentor, not my daddy.
I think you are driving down the wrong road having him as a mentor as well. And good on him for not liking the truck lites. I like them even more now. I think the guy is a pompus ***, that has a whole bunch of lemmings hanging around different forums spraying his BULL. Hey, at least his lights test good with little meters and crap.
Hilldweller
SE Expedition Society
Yeah, people who design automotive lighting for a living don't know anything about actually using lights. And science is overrated. The test and measurement field is a total scam. Light can't be measured; it can only be experienced....
[/sarcasm.off]
yep. Again, I bring up the digital camera. People who are supposedly experts, do tests for this and that, and come up with their conclusions based on pixel peeping and "in lab" testing, then when you look at the photos they way you are supposed to look at photos, the story is totally different. Fine they do great in labs, but that's not where you use lights, cameras etc. You use them in the real world for lighting up roads etc in the night. To say something is crap because it "tested" bad, is the same as saying that a certain camera is absolute garbage because when magnified 1000x, you can see a jagged pixel in the top left corner of the sensor. Its not the intended use of the product. If this were the case, No one would use anything other than a 50" led light bar because when tested they put out 50,000 lumens. We all know they do not perform as well as their tests suggest. And to say light force light are crap? really? I have seen them in action, both halogen and their HID versions and they are far from crap. What would you suggest for a long range light? I would love to know.
You should probably lay off the danny stern pixie dust a bit.
You should probably lay off the danny stern pixie dust a bit.
1stDeuce
Explorer
Well, since there's about to be a fight on the forum, I'll head us away from the current discussion and back to a question asked on the first page, and covered lightly a few times... I did a relay upgrade on the sealed beam lights on my old '82 Chevy. I didn't directly measure the voltage drop, but rather before and after voltage at the light (high beams on, engine running) at 11.5ish before, and after at 14ish after. (had a needle multimeter back then...) If you see less than 12v at the headlight, with the headlights on and the truck running, you'll get noticeable improvement from running them on relays. I was running halogen sealed bulbs, and didn't have any problems with them burning out or anything like that.
I just cut the factory wring at the fender on the driver's side and used the original wiring to switch the relay. I ran power to the relays from right off the battery with a 30 amp fuse. (Well, right off the distribution block on the firewall anyway, which was only .1v lower than the alternator output.) From the relays to the headlights, I used the original wiring. You can run all new wiring to the headlights if you want, but in my case, I was only going to get a few tenths of a volt for the effort and it didn't seem worth it. I got rid of 20+ feet of wiring and multiple old connections and switches, and gained 2.5v at the headlight. VERY noticeable improvement!!
I just cut the factory wring at the fender on the driver's side and used the original wiring to switch the relay. I ran power to the relays from right off the battery with a 30 amp fuse. (Well, right off the distribution block on the firewall anyway, which was only .1v lower than the alternator output.) From the relays to the headlights, I used the original wiring. You can run all new wiring to the headlights if you want, but in my case, I was only going to get a few tenths of a volt for the effort and it didn't seem worth it. I got rid of 20+ feet of wiring and multiple old connections and switches, and gained 2.5v at the headlight. VERY noticeable improvement!!
Last edited:
But there are a greater many that are wrong for everyone in terms of an on-road lamp.
Sure he does. Maybe not about Lightforce lights, other than what he'd said already-- and that was as kind as anyone could possibly say about their offerings.
Actually, I thought the "popular" belief was that they are good, at least to hear people raving about them. The objective truth about them is that they are bad. Just from their marketing material one can tell that they do not understand automotive lighting one whit.
Lightforce claims that their "Crystal Blue filters are used to increase clarity when driving", when nothing could be further from the truth. Blue light is difficult for the human eye to process, and because it refracts more sharply than red or green light within the human eye, it focuses in front of the retina, essentially giving a near-sighted effect. The same goes for their claim that "Marine Blue filters are used to enhance visibility and safety when driving through the snow, in rain or through sea spray". These make things worse because they leave even LESS light to see by, and again, it's blue light that the human optical system has a hard time processing-- the poor focus being just a small part of the problem.
They say that "amber filters are used to enhance vision when off-road driving through haze and dust", but amber (or SAE Yellow) is a *signal* color, not a color-to-drive-by color. They claim that "yellow filters are used to enhance vision in fog, haze and dust", but don't detail if their yellow filters are genuinely selective yellow or if they're just some kind of yellow-ish color.
For all of those filters, they come in "beam styles" like "spot" or "wide beam", as if adding a very simple lens would really control the light properly.
Do you even know why he doesn't like them? Or do you see his name and put the blinders on?
Those "little meters and crap" are what keep property from being damaged and people from being hurt or killed. Do you know just how complex the design of an automotive headlamp is, and the complexity of the beam it must put out?
The problem with your analogy is that the quality of a digital camera is ultimately going to be subjective. Objectively, the digital camera may not faithfully capture the intended scene, but subjectively it produces "great pictures". Automotive lighting is the reverse-- I can *easily* design a subjectively awesome headlamp (if Lightforce can do it, so can I) that is objectively poor and in all actuality quite dangerous. This is why it takes real design and real testing, with knowledge of how the human optical system handles light.
This is why people will go 60mph down the highway on a clear night with their fog lamps on with their headlamps, because they think they're seeing better than their headlamps alone. Objectively poor designs are more likely to be viewed as subjectively good because we're all just incredibly talented at fooling ourselves.
It's people that think they know what's best for on-road automotive lighting (without *really* knowing what's best) that increases the need for people who *do* know best to make the on-road automotive lighting decisions for the rest.
Off-road use? By all means, do what you want. On road? Nope.
SSF556
SE Expedition Society
Actually you are wrong...Bill has said great things about my WK OEM housings and HIR bulbs.
Hilldweller
SE Expedition Society
Beats me why some people hold such disdain for facts and expertise; Alaric; thanks for your insightful response. To me they're things to be lauded.
Dangit; you change your name?
...which make my JWS LEDs look like toys.
Dangit; you change your name?
one thing I will agree with is blue light is crap. Lightforce lights WITHOUT the blue filters on them are great lights. They light up a ton of road in front of you and a long way down the road. I am guessing most of you live in areas where there is lit highways and lots of population. Where I live, there is no light on the highway, and a very low population of people. So, in the night, having auxiliary lighting is a must have for spotting things like huge black bear, moose (some of the largest in the world), caribou and other animals. Unlike "mr stern" and I guess bill. they like to see 100 ft in front of them and that's it. me, I like to see as far as I can and as wide as I can while driving on the highways at night to avoid these walking obstructions that KILL many people a year. I would love to know what headlights mr stern designed. I know its nothing german, as they are all made by hella.(pretty well the only factory headlight worth a damn on a vehicle today) And im sure he would not bite the hand that feeds by trash talking hella aux. lights like he and bill do. lemming over the cliff. Head lights are one thing, Driving lights like the O.P. asked about are entirely another. I know what I view works. I don't care what Danny or Bill has to say about how they work in a test environment. I could care less, I know that when I turn my lights on I see a long way down the road with lots of light put to the sides, front and everywhere in between. I could care less what they say about eyes lying...WHO GIVES TWO F*&Ks if they do, YOU turn your lights on and you SEE. that is the whole point of adding lights? I am def. not adding lights not to see.
SSF556
SE Expedition Society
Yep....no more scooter...
And can oversaturate the foreground with light, cutting your ability to see the distance.
Guesses and supposition.
It's more common than you think.
No, they don't. When you consider U.S. low beam performance, you're off by 100 to 200 feet. That's just the *low* beams.
Part of that is not oversaturating the foreground.
Hella's offerings run the gamut from excellent to cheap, cheap, cheap. As far as "the only factory headlight worth a damn", you've obviously not heard of Koito (or NAL, "North American Lighting", one of their family companies).
Auxiliary high beam lamps (what you call "driving lights") are designed to see by, but you're describing lamps that don't do that if you get "lots of light put to the sides, front and everywhere in between" because of that "lots of light" is in the immediate foreground, you're not seeing as well as you should.
It's good that you "could care less", because that means you actually *care*. Part of caring is reading carefully, and taking the time to understand that very smart, very educated (sometimes a combination of both) people work on lighting, and the people that came up with the standards did so for very good reasons. If it were up to everyone to decide "what works best for them" there wouldn't be any laws regarding vehicle lighting. "Heck, let's let Joe do what he wants! Joe knows *best* what works for him!"
But you don't have the road all to yourself. You share it with the moose and the deer and the other drivers and the trees and you're going to end up hitting any one of those things if your lighting system doesn't perform correctly. You're either going to blind another driver, or you've blinded yourself and not even realized it. Having just all kinds of light is meaningless if it's not in the right places.