Help Needed for Bright Head Lights & Driving Lights

[smdad]

Hi I found this board. It looks interesting. My questions are from a new novice.
I have a 1997 Buick Lesabre. I just had the stock, low beam head lamps changed to Halogen. Should they have :thanks:changed the High beams too?
Second I'm looking for Driving lights to help my night vision on darker roads.
Any Suggestions?
Anyone know of a good shop in NYC where I can buy them & have them installed?
Thanks for your time & patience.
Have a great holiday season,
Lenny Bronx, NYC

 

[SilverFox]

Hello Smdad,

Welcome to CPF.

I will move this over to the transportation section of the forum. This area is for headlamps worn on a persons head.

Tom

 

[smdad]

Thank you Tom. Sorry for posting in the wrong area.
Lenny

 

[-Virgil-]

I have a 1997 Buick Lesabre. I just had the stock, low beam head lamps changed to Halogen.

They are halogen from the factory. I don't know what you had installed — see if you can find your receipt and/or packaging and let us know what you were actually sold. Unfortunately, there's a great deal of BS and con artistry going on in the promotion and sale of headlight bulbs, even from seemingly reputable, big-name companies.

Second I'm looking for Driving lights to help my night vision on darker roads.

"Driving lights" can't safely (or lawfully) be used in traffic or with low beams, only on empty roads with high beams. They should be mounted as close as possible to headlight height, and they need to be wired so that they can only be switched on with the high beams and they switch off as soon as you kick down to low beam (without your having to touch the driving light switch). Mounting auxiliary lights on modern cars can be a real pain; consider this a last resort if you can't make the headlights do everything you need.

You may not actually need to add driving lights. Your '97 LeSabre originally takes 9005 high beam and 9006 low beam bulbs, which means you can install the DOT-legal, much brighter "HIR" bulbs, see this post for more information. The other two things you should to do wring the most possible effective light out of your headlights is aim them correctly and feed them properly (links go offsite). If you do install relays, you can set them up so the low beams remain lit with the high beams, which I think is not presently the case on your '97. That helps improve the width and coverage on high beam.

 

[radioflyer97]

Without a complete retrofit, your headlights are limited to high wattage halogen bulbs.


Regarding driving lights, that would depend on what kind of roads you drive on at night.

If you spend a good deal of your night driving on highways, I'd suggest pencil beam lights mounted low and aimed as close to horizontal as possible.

If you drive on back roads at relatively low speed, I use Hella Micro DEs with an H3-rebased 55w HID Kit. The pattern is actually better with the longer HID bulb than the h3 halogen:

The MicroDE's cutoff will limit glare to oncoming traffic and it's wide pattern will significantly help.

 

[-Virgil-]

Uh...no, on all counts.

High-wattage bulbs will burn out the original poster's wiring and sooner than later will damage (melt) his plastic headlamp reflectors.

All those "HID kit" equipped Micro DEs are doing is flooding the foreground with grossly excessive amounts of light, making you feel nice and secure in what seems like kickaѕѕ lighting. In actual fact, that's a useless place to have that much light, and it's destroying your eyes' dark adaptation and sharply limiting your distance vision. If all you're doing is creeping along at 25 mph, this might be sort of appropriate, but at higher speeds than that, it's working very efficiently against you. And these are not even close to appropriate for use in traffic; the ultra-high surface luminance you've created with your "HID kit" means they are way too glaring regardless of how they're aimed or how sharp the cutoff is. (And as if all that weren't enough, from your pics they look very badly misaimed.)

And pencil beams mounted low and aimed horizontally aren't any more legal or safe in traffic than pencil beams mounted and aimed anywhere else. But they're markedly less effective on empty roads than pencil beams mounted up where they should be.

 

[F250XLT]

This looks very interesting.