To clarify, there is no such company as "Cibie Japan" because there is no such company as Cibie. Cibie is a brand, and no longer a very widely applied one. Since 1968 or so it has belonged to Valeo, a large France-based auto parts conglomerate with offices and manufacturing plants all over the world.
SEV Marchal is BACK!
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To clarify, there is no such company as "Cibie Japan" because there is no such company as Cibie. Cibie is a brand, and no longer a very widely applied one. Since 1968 or so it has belonged to Valeo, a large France-based auto parts conglomerate with offices and manufacturing plants all over the world.
Cibie Japan is a company insofar it's a registered company that markets lighting products under the brand Cibie, as is SEV Marchal. In these respective cases Cibie and SEV Marchal is simply used due to historic respect of the respective brands, they could have as easily been Scheinwerfermann lighting company, except would most certainly have technically superior products!
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My understanding is that there is no such company as "Cibie Japan". There is a Japanese online 4x4 outfitter that has the cibie.com domain, and they sell Cibie lamps (among others). But mine may not be a full understanding of the situation; the Japanese market is difficult for outsiders to penetrate because of language, economic, and cultural barriers.
they could have as easily been Scheinwerfermann lighting company, except would most certainly have technically superior products!
Ha ha
Oh, the lamps I would "magic" into existence if I could!RestoCustoms
Newly Enlightened
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Newbie here! Never imagined there might be a lighting forum, much less one with folks interested in Ampiluxes (l. Ampiluces?).
Anyway, whenever I think about the abysmal lighting on my old cars I end up lamenting the lack of a proper 7" round HID replacements. And when I stare at my old, pitted, & faded Ampiluxes that I had on my 1st 356 (with relays & 100W bulbs) I wonder if there're enough folks out there to support a proper re-design of the old standard to current HID bulbs.
Whadya think? I loved blasting through the night with 400W aimed through crystal. How great would it be with modern illumination?
Email me if you're interested. I'm talking quality engineering & production.
TX,
[email protected]
Larkspur, CO
Anyway, whenever I think about the abysmal lighting on my old cars I end up lamenting the lack of a proper 7" round HID replacements. And when I stare at my old, pitted, & faded Ampiluxes that I had on my 1st 356 (with relays & 100W bulbs) I wonder if there're enough folks out there to support a proper re-design of the old standard to current HID bulbs.
Whadya think? I loved blasting through the night with 400W aimed through crystal. How great would it be with modern illumination?
Email me if you're interested. I'm talking quality engineering & production.
TX,
[email protected]
Larkspur, CO
There is a small but passionate community of vehicle lighting "geeks". I've made my peace with that term (now it's a term of respect; in the past it was not). You might get some good ideas by running your thoughts past Daniel Stern if you haven't already; seems to me he was involved in a feasibility study of this or something like it some years back.
But there is a proper 7" round HID headlamp, in the form of an up-to-date Hella BiXenon projector in a housing to mount directly in place of any standard 7" round sealed beam or H4 unit, etc.
I think you would probably find engineering, tooling, and building something like this to anything like an OEM standard of design, construction, and performance will be very(!) much more expensive than you might realize.
Hamilton Felix
Enlightened
If you have the money, there are nice HID and LED options for 7 inch round lights. And if you are hung up on Amplilux, PM me. I have a pair that I bought new in the early 1980's, but have never used (other than to light one up in the basement to see what the beam looked like). They've stayed with me through a divorce, remarriage and a few moves. I still even have one of the boxes. Fascinating bit of lighting history. "Tunnel vision" high beam. I understand that some racers adjusted the high beam elevation to match low beam, then ran both beams with the brightest bulbs they could, in an effort to get maximum light out of the available 7 inch round space. I'm sure today's options outperform that old trick.
In the early 1970's I bought a pair of 7 or 8" Marchal auxiliary lights, deep form, gray paint. Bolted them into my car for rally and backroad use. And I changed out the original bulbs for thoroughly illegal 100W bulbs, one each. Around 1990 they were stolen with (on) another car and I haven't seen them since. But if you come across a set painted bright red over the gray--that's them.
Anyway, the car I'm driving now has bi-xenon factory lights. Nice BRIGHT lights. But unless my memory has really faded, the grand new factory bi-xenons still don't light up a stop sign a mile down the road, the way the Marchal's did. Maybe some third party technology does and it is simply that the car makers need to stay within the legal limits...as I recall, at the time, each of my 100W Marchal's was well in excess of the total legal limit for highway use.
And of course the quality of the housing, the lens, the waterproofing, was well in excess of any aftermarket lights I've seen today. They might have been $100-150 back then, complete with the extra 100W bulbs.
What are rally drivers using today? Surely not all vintage lighting?
AFAIK filament bulbs are still very much cost effective for occasional users.
Anyway, the car I'm driving now has bi-xenon factory lights. Nice BRIGHT lights. But unless my memory has really faded, the grand new factory bi-xenons still don't light up a stop sign a mile down the road, the way the Marchal's did. Maybe some third party technology does and it is simply that the car makers need to stay within the legal limits...as I recall, at the time, each of my 100W Marchal's was well in excess of the total legal limit for highway use.
And of course the quality of the housing, the lens, the waterproofing, was well in excess of any aftermarket lights I've seen today. They might have been $100-150 back then, complete with the extra 100W bulbs.
What are rally drivers using today? Surely not all vintage lighting?
AFAIK filament bulbs are still very much cost effective for occasional users.
Echo63
Flashlight Enthusiast
Around here its a combination of all sortson bloke recently gave up a pair of Hella Predators for LED spots in his bonnet pod (still has a pair of predators in it though)one of the top cars is still running 4 predatorsA few lightforce 240sHella 4000 compacts with HID kitsled barscheap HID lightsa mate has an escort with 4x halogen rallye 2000svarious other halogen units, oscars, superoscars and cheapiesas i said - all sorts
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