LED Lighting Conversion

Oh man! I just might have to jump on this GB...that's by far the best price I have seen. Ever

 

That is the best price I’ve seen as well.

I powered my Morimotos up yesterday on the rack for the first time using a bench linear DC variable power supply and they had nice clean cut offs. Not as great of a beam as Rigid, but Rigids SAE pods also require adapter plates making them significantly more expensive.

Rigid pictured (I didn’t take Morimoto photos when I was initially testing out the setup, this is all preliminary actual wall shot tests will be at greater distance).

 

OKAY. It was too good to pass these up for $136 (and free shipping). I caved. But it's for a good cause. Better lighting that is safer and looks nicer, plus it also helps eliminate more chrome bits.

With it being a group buy, I'll have to wait a few weeks for it to arrive tho. But a few weeks is a lot shorter than the many months I was planning to wait originally! lol

 

Same here. Thanks @crashnburn80 for the heads up. Just placed my order as well.

 

Cool guys, you will not be disappointed! That's the price I paid.

The down side is they make the headlights look so much more, well, chrome-y.

 

I bet. Now I really need my wife to leave for a weekend so I can do the BHLM now. LOL There is no way she could even fathom why I'd put those in an oven just to paint the insides black.

 

After seeing what could happen?! You sir are a real brave man!

 

You just need to find that right level of zen (aka buzz). You know...where you've had enough so that you don't care, but not too much were it impairs your abilities.

 

Ha! Yea, my luck the pile of ash on the sidewalk would be the size of a house!

 

As long as you document it, take pictures, and then share it here!

 

Naturally.

You mean like this F up.....






Although I still say the damage occurred during shipping and I didn't notice it until the install.

 

Hate to be a lazy piece of shit and not dig through all this but what fog LED swap are people happy with? I turned to this thread and swapped my LO’s and Fogs, couldn’t be happier. Here’s shitty daytime shots with stock vs. LED’s in fogs and an action shot so you mother fuckers known i mean business. And thanks for this thread, it’s helped me learn!

 

What did you use for your fogs?

 

I got the First Page Special, JDM ASTAR. Quite happy with them. Plug and play, heaps brighter for a quick 18 bucks

Edit. i meant to ask “what DRL/LED’s are people using”

DRL suggestions?

 

Are the stock DRLs even replaceable? I mean I don’t mind the color since that’s about the only LEDs toyota graced us with, but it looks like a light strip built into the housing...I could be wrong...

 

They are replaceable, but only with an identical LED board.

Here is a video of how to do it (minus the backing of the headlamp to separate the lens so that you can get to the PCB board that the LEDs are soldered on to):

 

I can guarantee you they are not actually brighter. They just glare more due to loss of beam control with whiter light, which makes them seem "brighter".

Check out the Morimoto group buy, they will blow those drop in LEDs out of the water with much higher output while actually maintaining a correct fog beam pattern meaning better forward illumination while maintaining cut offs.

 

How’s the Hikari testing coming along? Any progress?

 

The new Hikari H11s are sitting on the bench ready to go. But I have been working on the pod rack lately now that I have it all wired up, so that may come first.

One thing I like to do for every thread is look for ways to improve and learn more (for myself) than the previous thread. What did I not do well enough and how can I make it better? While people may think I am very hard on them, I am significantly harder on myself. To take things to the next level, I'm looking at utilizing a full digital spectrometer for testing, from the same company Toyota uses for their light testing. These things are a small fortune, as in generally starting around $1500.00 for a basic model. But after running some preliminary tests on the pods, I know some companies are flat out lying on specs and not at all by a small margin. Stuff I know the average consumer would not notice without having a small other pods for comparison, but I'm that data guy, and can prove through quantitative analysis that people are being cheated. Some pods are coming in at 60% of their advertised power draw. On top of that, I believe many of these pods are running the exact same internal platform with mildly different housings despite being advertised otherwise. Capturing the LED light signature using a digital spectrometer and comparing it to other lights will easily expose those that to those that try to oversell their lights as something better than they are.

The difference in cost of lights that have literally identical performance can be 3x. Meaning one person could hypothetically pay $300 for a $100 product by looking at the deceivingly overinflated specs by a misleading vendor. I have zero tolerance for vendors that mislead consumers with misinformation on their products.

 

Ordered two pairs of the morimoto's one for me and one for my wife's 4runner, pretty excited about that! I am also going to do the BHLM and have all the paint and new butyl seal all ready. The wife actually supports mine, her previous job was interior design so she is all about things looking good. I did not show her the thread where the guy lit everything on fire though lol.


@crashnburn80 burn80 AWESOME. I don't have the patience and wouldn't spend the money to do that, but I think it is great you are, and I would really like to know which companies are lying because I've bought plenty of lights in the past and will be in the future. So thank you in advance !!