The ultimate headlight upgrade H4 (not LED or HID)

No. You only need one harness. You just need the correct harness for your truck.

 

You should be conventional power switched with a 2nd Gen, that does not use headlight DRLs. (Not talking about signal amber DRLs). The Headlight Services harness is a better quality product at a lower price.

 

Understood. Will have to give this a try when the fund is available.

 

Have any clue what the 1st gen tundras are? Just curious, haven’t had a chance to check mine yet.

 

I don’t. Coming out in 99 I couldn’t tell you if they had transitioned those to conventional power switched wiring yet, or if they rolled them out with ground switched wiring. You’ll need to check with a multimeter.

 

I figured. Was worth asking. I’ll be able to dick with it Monday.. my meter is out getting warrantied

 

Welcome to the forum!

Lunex is an Indian company that puts up a facade as though they are a UK startup, but they are not. I do not recall those products being in this thread, but I did cover them in the 3rd Gen thread. Diffraction bulbs like the plasma yellows work by diffracting (bending) blue light out of the beam pattern to make the main beam more yellow. The lower color temperature the beam, the more light is diffracted from the main pattern area. Unfortunately this diffracted blue light ends up above the cut off, causing increased glare. In a 3rd Gen projector this is mitigated by the projector light shield, but in a reflector housing it is not. The plasma yellows have a more aggressive diffraction coating than the all seasons, meaning higher percentage of light placed above the cut off. While the bulbs I tested were advertised as +80, they were not, it was a marketing lie from an unreputable manufacture. The first two shipments of bulbs also never made it through customs and 'Lunex' was of no help.

While my typical thread model is to collect all the data possible and then put together a data backed thread, in the 3rd Gen headlight thread I took a different approach and started with a base set of data (the original post) then continued to explore the performance of various products to find improvements and shared the results as I went, and continued to update the product recommendations, which are captured in posts #2 and #3. I thought this would be a more engaging/interesting model as an ongoing experiment and I was really eager to bring some science to the 3rd Gen lighting forum, because it so desperately needed it. However, this was not perfect and did lead to a few dead ends, like Lunex products. Where products would falsify performance claims and/or hide behind fake brand identities to appear more reputable. The reason you cannot easily find them in the thread is I cleaned all those garbage manufactures out of the original few posts to improve the information quality density in the thread, and because I did not want people buying their poor quality products because they saw it in my thread.

I do not think you are going to find the poor weather performance you are looking for in a diffraction bulb product when running in a reflector. I've tried, it doesn't make a difference. What I would recommend for poor weather performance is upgrading the fogs to Rigid Selective Yellow SAE D-series. Check out this post:

Regardless, here is the data you are looking for:


Note that the GE Xenon +120s are higher output intensity than the GE +130, and that Philips H9s are higher output than the Lunex bulbs.

I drive over the passes at night in crap weather more often than I would care for this time of year and have been exploring ways to improve visibility in poor weather. You might find this data interesting. These are KC Pro6 SAE J581 (aux high beam) driving lights with KC's amber cover. Far higher intensity than a diffraction H9, lower color temperature, and zero short wavelength light by comparison which is what reflects in poor weather. Could be something to consider, granted as a high beam they cannot be run with oncoming/forward traffic, but the performance benefits are pretty clear. What I ideally wanted to be able to do in those terrible weather conditions is kill the headlights (when no other cars are visible) and just run on my aux SAE J581 driving lights and fogs in selective yellow.

 

@crashnburn80
Thank you for the reply.

"I do not think you are going to find the performance you are looking for in a diffraction bulb product."

I'm not surprised to hear that. As I said, my subjective impressions are that selective yellow has been most effective for foul weather, but that its easily flagged be LE as "clearly modified/probably illegal." Which is unfortunate. I have had success with lens tinting and non-tinted bulbs, and I will probably return to that. My vehicle is registered in Idaho now, which only restricts nontransparent lens coatings or covers. Duplicolor metalcast anodize yellow dries crystal clear yellow tint, so I'll risk it. I've had success achieving a good yellow tint with kapton tape over plastic lenses I didnt wish to paint, as well.

PA did not allow fog light only illumination in foul weather, which negated the point of fog lamps. So until now I have not bothered with looking into fogs. I'm glad to see there are high performing selective yellow options available in LED now. I'll take a good look through your thread.

Currently I have a relay harness, but have so far been avoiding high wattage bulbs. Its good to see that your testing shows there are some high wattage bulbs that still have good focus.

As far as auxiliary highbeams, Im running a set of cibie super oscar LED lamps. Mine are the lower output version, 75kcd rated. They are 6500k which makes them near useless in any sort of fog/rain/sleet. I have tried using kapton tape to cut the amount of blue wavelengths, but they end up a funky green/barely yellow which is... uncomfortable to drive with. I'm planning to crack them open and reflow solder in 3 or 4000k high cri LEDs, which should perform the same untinted, but also be more easily filtered to yellow for foul weather. Do you have a testing thread for these auxiliary highbeams/driving lamps? I'd send you my set (not tampered with for now) if you havent had a chance to compare a cibie led product yet. I based my purchase off of my experience with older cibie offerings (halogen cibie super oscar and charlie 35's). Theres not much out there in the way of objective comparison when it comes to aux lighting unfortunately.

Edit: are these the bulbs you are currently recommending for high output and enhanced focus? Or do you have a link for the osram all weather high output bulbs?

$15 OSRAM 62204SBP Premium Off-Road Super Bright H4 Headlight Bulb Vibration-Proof Technology, Yellow

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NRA91XM?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=AE49RO0G3TC77

 

Hello from Greece!

Very nice forum and thread!

I do believe in halogen lighting and here is my little adventure about it:
"Forced Aircooled, ultra high wattage, halogen h4, headlamps"

The Triplet Halogen




Although it seems that there is a lot of glaring in this headlight, the reality is that there is no glaring at all, when everything is ready, the light beam can be controlled.

 

I made it through the whole thread. Crash thanks for keeping the first post up to date.

I was torn about building my own harness vs just buying the Headlight services harness. I decided I would just order the harness complete to see what all the fuss is about. I do enjoy soldering though, maybe I will build the next one for my old 4runner. Do we have wiring diagrams to diy build both of these harnesses?

I have been working my way through the lighting upgrades. Now that it is getting dark at 3pm, I finally had the motivation I needed. The reverse light upgrade is fantastic. It improved the rear side lighting so much. Pictures do not do it justice.

I also found these old PIAA fog lights while cleaning out my garage. I have had them laying around for over a decade. I welded up some mounts out of some scrap, cleaned up the harness and stuck them on. I need to beef up the mounts just a bit. I get some flicker when I hit pot holes and bridges. I mostly wanted to improve my side lighting with these, and they do. I am always on dark, curvy country roads. I murdered a deer last year and I would like to try to avoid doing that again. I did some testing with on coming traffic and I got flashed once out of about 30 cars. I adjusted them down just a tad and I think I am good now. I wont be using these fogs in heavy traffic, but I would like to be able to leave them on when meeting the occasional car on a back road.

I have read through a few fog light aiming procedures also. I do have both of mine pointed just a bit outside to help with the side lighting. Daniel Stern specifically says to point them straight ahead. Why is this?

Finally I polished up my OEM headlights. They were pretty terrible. Now I am just waiting on my headlight upgrade parts to get here.

 

Best stock wattage bulbs I've tested for low beam have been the Philips Racing Vision +150, but they do coat the high beam filament leading to reduced high beam performance. The best stock wattage bulbs without a filament coated high beam are the GE Xenon +120s. There are some high wattage bulbs like the Hellas tested that failed to match the peak intensity output of a stock wattage performance +xxx style bulb in a Tacoma 2nd Gen headlight. More compact light assemblies seem generally more sensitive to enhanced focus as the small geometry changes are relatively more significant. The 2nd Gen light assemblies are relatively massive as far as reflector headlights go, so I believe they are a bit less responsive/more forgiving, all other things being generally equal. The high wattage and +30 enhanced focus bulbs are the Osram Hypers. They are discontinued and supplies have long since been wiped out. Occasionally someone in this thread may sell their stash when they sell their H4 based truck, but otherwise they are practically impossible to come by. The next highest intensity output I have tested is the IPF Fatboy X4, though they are ridiculously expensive and have a stock wattage high beam, followed by the Osram SuperBrights that you have linked above.

I am familiar with Cibie, they are a very highly regarded brand for excellent quality lights, especially among their halogen offerings. But I was turned off by the color temperature spec of their LED driving lights, I expected better. As you have discovered, bluish light plus yellow filter = green light. Their color temperature is way to high for a thin yellow filter, that will only work on a halogen light that has minimal short wavelength light to filter out. You'd need a heavy amber filter to have better success with a higher color temp LED, but even then a lower color temperature light source will work significantly better with an amber filter to produce yellow light. LED placement in the assembly is critical to focus, attempting a DIY emitter replacement will likely affect the beam pattern focus.

I am actually working on putting together an upcoming SAE J581 aux high beam thread. For my LED SAE driving lights I selected KC's Pro6. While not up to the reputation of Cibie, the Pro6 lights have good projection specs and a 5000k color temperature. Without digging too much it looks like the Cibie 7" driving lights project 340m vs the KCs 6" driving lights 374m. Of course there is far more to a driving light than projection distance, but that is one spec I was looking at when trying to decide which lights to run. If you wanted to send me a light I can certainly compare them to the Pro6 and stock high beam and provide some numbers. I'd personally find it interesting to check out the Cibies.

Here are a couple teaser posts I've had on the aux high beam topic, you may be interested in the 2nd one using KCs amber lenses for yellow output. The yellow color is really well done IMO.

 

Welcome to the forum from across the water.

I'm really not sure what you have going on there, but it looks like 3 halogen bulbs retrofitted into a headlight assembly cooled by fans placed inside the assembly. This is such a bad idea on so many levels, it looks like it came out of a Mad Max movie. You cannot add more light source points in a housing designed for one and have the beam pattern at all resemble what it should. You'll end up with massive amounts of light above what should be your cut off, and no resemblance of the intended beam pattern. This will be exceptionally unsafe for street use due to lack of a compliant pattern. Not to mention current draw will be excessive and heat will be extreme, regardless of a cooling fan inside the headlight which also will partially obstruct output. The IPF fatboys are not a 195w bulb, that is misleading marketing BS when they make claims of 60/80w = 155/195w, typically that is based very loosely on color temperature not output. They are covered in the output charts in the original post on this thread and do provide good low beam performance. Even using a single ultra high wattage 100w+ low beam bulb is going to lead to much thicker filaments which will have poorer focus and may not project as far on low beam as a more moderate high wattage bulb. Increasing halogen output magnifies all light in the pattern, including up light. Using ultra high wattage bulb will also significantly increase up-light (when used as an appropriate single bulb) moreso than lower output bulbs, while also possibly not projecting as far. Not to mention bulb life is going to be exceptionally short, as in the ballpark 40 hour range.

If you need that much more light, invest good headlight assemblies, a standalone wiring harness and a single quality performance bulb. Then add aux driving lights for further performance enhancements if needed, that can be turned off when there is other forward traffic on the road.

 

I believe this is due to glare. Halogen reflector fogs typically do a very poor job of glare control, aiming the left one into oncoming traffic is going to make it worse for the oncoming drivers.

 

For the
crashnburn80

, not a quoted answer due to an addon malfunction.

You are right to everything you said with one exception: when you get in the geometry of the headlamp you can find headroom for modifications and adjustments.

The h4 headlights are capable of giving much more light and, as an adaptive system, meaning that, according to the needs, the bulbs may be active or not, focusing specific parts on the road.

The main, central, bulb is not affected, especially in the reversed implementation, and nothing happens to the normal head lamp operation if there is no demand for extra light.

But even if they are operated simultaneously, the three low beams, can be under control using the proper light fragments, easily.

It is a matter of redesigning the total thing.

The thermal stress tests saw that the poly-carbonate lens do not have any problem even if they are not aircooled, stationary on the bench! (At least the specific one).

When the fans operate, there is a drop of the temperature for all the surfaces, there is an edge smoothing for everything.

The cons are:

1)A lot of diy work without benchmarks.

2)Very high current drawing, under circumstances, an horse may be sacrificed, (746w), and the electric system is overstressed, but it depends, can be affordable according to the implementation.


The pros are:

1)The fence is down, imagination is the limit.

2)The yellowish, (so called by the snobs), light of the halogens, having the correct frequency for our eyes, can be stronger than any other kind of car lighting, (lasers included).

 

No. There is absolutely no 'headroom' in headlight optical geometry for 'modification and adjustments' of adding additional light sources. This is an asinine half baked idea that clearly lacks a fundamental understanding of how headlight optics work.

I really try not to be a jerk, but let me spell this out really clearly:

This is the worst idea I have ever seen in my entire headlight career, bar none.

You clearly lack any understanding whatsoever of how headlights work and I honestly don't fault people for that. But you need to study up on reflector optics focus and halogen light source focus, once you do you will realize how horrifying your proposed mods are.

 

The adaptiveness of the system is that answers to any objections, starting from an identical original operation, according to demands.

 

I'm not sure how to break this down any more clear, this is a horrible idea that you will not find any support for on any reputable lighting forum.
None. Zero. Zip. Nada. Never.

You cannot add additional light sources to a headlight assembly, it doesn't work that way, like not remotely at all.

Again, the correct thing to do is upgrade your headlights in a traditional fashion and add aux driving lights as necessary.

 

It was just a try to inform you for my findings.

At the link I gave you, of my blog, you can see the various patterns of light when the system is on fully vs the original.

The research is going on.

Thank you for your time.

 

Just a tiny detail: they claim a 3200K, so the 155/195w declaration is not based on color temperature.

 

Here is my new creation: h4+h3!

Everything with respect to the oncoming traffic drivers, (and to the h4, paraboloid, headlight optics geometry).

one head light, low beam, fat boy h4:




one head light, low beam, fat boy h4 + conventional h3 55w:


(still not ready for traffic)