The SAE J581 Aux High Beam Thread

Here you go!

 

So, BAMF is the best/only mount but the one linked is for a light bar? So it requires mods for ss3? Hard to believe nobody makes a grille with cutout for driving lights. That seems like a no brainer.

 

Unsure if they are the only one, they are just a design I found and like for the purpose. You do not need the optional light bar bracket extension to mount lights to the mount. The mount has many slotted sections so you can mount a light directly to the bar and have plenty of options on horizontal position, as I've mocked up below. The bracket mounts at the top of the radiator (in height), putting lights aligned at the top of the grill opening. You might have to play with vertical spacing depending on your Gen and grill. The brackets to mount a light bar in the lower valence opening are far more common that brackets to mount lights behind the grill.



I had this grill custom made for my 2nd Gen to mount the KCs to the sides as shown.

 

Just another @crashnburn80 lighting thread to obsess over. Better start warming up the wallet too.

 

Same....

 

How do the pro in sae driving compare to the max in driving? I realize the max driving pattern isn’t sae approved but I’m using them on the A pillar so that doesn’t matter a lot since it’s not a street legal location anyhow.

 

I was curious how long it would be before that question was asked. I have not yet tested the Max with the driving optic but will do so soon and post results here. As you noted, the Max is not SAE compliant, so I intentionally left it out of the original post.

 

I look forward to your comparison. I went with the pros mostly because of the 4k option for my wife’s truck but her headlights and fog lights are closer to 6k anyhow. The max were certainly tempting tho.

 

I'm a big fan of the 4000k color output. In the pillar mount location though, I'd anticipate the Max being beneficial for a tighter beam pattern causing less hood glare due to the smaller emitters giving greater focus, in addition to having higher output intensity. I'd anticipate a pattern area coverage somewhere in-between the Sport and Pro. I'll need to test them though to see the differences first hand.

 

The 4k is great. I have a set each of selective yellow and 4k pros in sae fog on my ram. Having the yellows I never use the 4k tho so I’m swapping them out with the yellow sae driving light lenses my wife’s set came with. I’m interested to see if they’re at all beneficial during poor weather conditions. I have all the forward facing light I could ever use so it’s just something to do.

I’m mostly looking to light up the sides of the road for upcoming deer and such so the wider spread of the pros might suit me better, hard to tell without trying both tho. I’m too use to copious amounts of light on my truck I can’t stand just factory lighting on my wife’s truck lol.

 

Good observation, the top pic was taken prior to rotation of the pod by 90 degrees.

It’s hard to tell but in the 2nd pic you can see the emitter has been rotated to the correct position.
The Pro6’s just sit sandwiched between the front and back of the mounting housing, loosen the Allen bolts and rotate the lamp accordingly.

 

Im in the process of modifying a trd pro grill. Going to do a cutout in the top corners and mount some ss3 pro driving in 4k behind them. Ill post up some pics when done. Just waiting on those ss3 to come in the mail.

 

So, two LEDs on a hardmounted mcpcb... it looks pretty prime material for someone handy at reflow soldering to swap emitters . Not technically legal, but I have much less qualms about modifying auxiliary high beam lamps given that there use should be relatively limited (in comparison to say modifying fogs or lowbeam headlamps).

 

With so much variation in beam pattern, I have a thought... Would it be worthwhile to measure the size of the reflector, or the pattern at say 1’ to equalize between the assembly sizes, vs the size is the pattern at 18’, and then extrapolate out a theoretical beam pattern spread at 100 yards, 200 yards, etc?

 

I think that would require mapping intensity at each location of each pattern in order to extrapolate that data, something that would be very labor and data intensive to do manually. I think that sort of work is best left to a goniometer, which is not a cheap piece of equipment.

 

That is certainly a nice thought, but as @mynameistory points out, that would be very labor intensive and you'd want to factor pattern intensity. I wish I had a Goniometer to provide automated testing of that kind of data and publish to everyone, but that kind of equipment is on the commercial grade expense scale. With that raw data output I could make some awesome plots with engineering plotting software, like I did for the Baja fogs:




While far more rudimentary, I do find the garage door panels helpful in factoring vertical pattern size, horizontal has to be ball parked a bit with the photos. Not to say an approximate beam size isn't possible though. I did it with the Subaru fogs covered post #3831, though it is easier with a highly defined pattern cut offs.

 

To be fair, Crash could set his lamps up and use a big sheet of cardboard taped to his garage door and trace out the federal test points to do apples-to-apples comparisons, but that would be a lot more labor intensive, and Crash has done a good job noting when bulbs (mostly LED) have dropped the max intensity point low in the beam pattern.

His use of a garage door gives at least some type of usable comparison between beam width and height.

 

Much respect to the guys that run the at home FMVSS 108 test, that is a lot of dedicated work. It definitely gives a far better picture of lighting performance than a single peak beam intensity measurement and there are guys out there that do it. As you mention, when I evaluate lights if the peak intensity is out of place, typically using LEDs in a halogen lamp, I do try to point out the inconsistently so it isn't a blind report of peak intensity with no regard to the beam pattern. I do heavy use standardized garage door photos to demonstrate the beam patterns, certainly not as good as a measured FMVSS 108 test but it is a simple low effort way to convey the output pattern performance. A quick scan of my database shows about 275 lighting products tested since going digital 28 months ago. I cannot imagine trying to test so many products manually with a FVMSS test. And for better or worse, I do try to make the lighting posts fairly end user friendly so that they are simple and straight forward to understand without wandering too far down the rabbit hole in technical detail.

 

Since I see you guys have been putting these lights behind the grill, that got me thinking. Do you think 4 SSC2's would fit nicely in the 4 top openings behind my 2020 OR grill? They look to be about the right size. I wonder if they would be any good as an aux high beam?

 

I’d honestly get the 30” diode dynamics bar and mount it behind the lower grill using caliraised LED brackets, pushing it as far forward as it’ll go and cutting the factory plastic out of the way.

@Diode Dynamics are the optics on the light bars swappable like the SS3 pods and do the amber bars use the same 4000k LED emitters?