Pre-made headlight harness?

Found one by a company/website called "Coolbulbs" which claims to be 14awg through out for only $35. Not sure I could even make one for this price considering I'd need the wire, 2x male and 2x female sockets, plus the relay(s) and connectors. Has anybody had experience with this brand? Any other options out there or is it hard to beat the value of a home made DIY job?

At that price,there is a 99% chance it is garbage.Cheap relays,cheap connectors, and/or sloppy construction are items to be considered regardless of advertised wire gauge.

Yeah, what Qship1996 said.

Back in my younger days,I was suckered into one of those bright yellow jacketed inexpensive "heavy duty" wiring harnesses you see all over ebay......learned the hard way,as it only lasted a few weeks before it melted at a connector and was thrown in the trash.

The last time I bought the cheapest headlight harness I could find, a connector fell off when I touched it while removing it from the bag.

It was a 100% waste of money, I ended up remaking 90% of it myself. It wasn't even sized correctly. Pretty sad when you have to mostly rat's nest a new harness just to make it work.

Buck91 said:

Found one by a company/website called "Coolbulbs" which claims to be 14awg through out for only $35. Not sure I could even make one for this price considering I'd need the wire, 2x male and 2x female sockets, plus the relay(s) and connectors. Has anybody had experience with this brand? Any other options out there or is it hard to beat the value of a home made DIY job?

Click to expand...

They do have the economy of scale working for them. They also save a LOT of money taking shortcuts, speccing low-quality parts, and not doing good quality control. When you make it yourself, you can do it as well or as poorly as your skill and your tolerance for shoddiness will let you . It gives you the chance to carefully plan the installation and route everything neatly so you're not tripping over your own wires in the engine bay when you're under the hood.

Best investment I ever made was purchasing a heavy-duty headlight harness from Susquehanna Motorsports {AKA Rallylights} At the time,I questioned,moaned and groaned over spending that amount of $$$ on a harness sight unseen,but upon arrival,it sure did look like a high quality,well crafted piece of art- and year after year,has proven itself bulletproof.Buy once,cry once applied here.

I recently installed one of these on my Ford Taurus and have been very satisfied with it. Seems to be good quality for the price and it definitely improved the amount of light I'm getting out of my headlights.

Avoid them at all cost. Those kits are made by a company called Nokya. Made the mistake to buy one kit. My history with the kit.

1)The relay they use are 30-85-86-87, BUT they are made in china and with quite unique shape and the 87s are splice to a single pin. After a few months of being used one the relay broke on me, since there are not replacement relays in that shape (at least in Argentina). I bought two relay made by Flosser plus twi relay bases and i rearranged to fit normal relays, on a side note Flosser relays comes with two 87. So no more spliced wire.

2)They don´t come with a Fuse, so i had to rewire the wires that went to the battery..... Not very safe to run a kit without fuses...
Link to Oversize Pic

3)The wire is listed as 14 awg, but they are far from being 14 awg, they are close to 16 awg. So i changed the wires to 11 awg. Worst the wires didn´t even have solder on the conections...

4)The female sockets are not ceramic, they did melt.... Had to change the sockets to ceramics.



In the end i had. New Relays, New Wires, New Sockets... The only thing that still remains from the Nokya kits are the rubber wire covers....
Just my expierence with them. I was a bit lazy so instead of making the kit myself with quality parts i took the cheap way...
You get what you pay for.... and for 38 you ain´t getting quality.

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SemiMan is right. This article explains it in great detail.

Well that was a nice read. You learn something new everyday.
Most of the harness i made that were either for headlight or aux lights, i crimped them with a wrench and put solder on them. I guess i will take the harness back to the drawing board.

What kind of crimping tool should i use to get the best results? Because this nokya were crimped and you could takle away the wire from the terminal quite esay.

GePa,

The crimper all depends on the terminals. The best one is the one that the terminal vendor specifies. Name brand terminal companies will, no names will just suggest generic tools.

Good crimp tools are expensive, $200-600 is not unusual. Often you can pick up last generation tools on EBay.

Of you don't have a proper crimper, the solder works. Just make sure you use heat shrink, preferably with the glue inside for strain relief. The version with glue provides more support.