LED Optic for car low beam?? - Offroad use only.

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mds82

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Hi All, First off i'll say that i am looking to make something that will be similar to a car headlight, but it will ONLY be used for off-road use only, so no legal concerns there at all. I would like a low beam with a cutoff and then a high beam as well. I'm having trouble trying to find an optic available to use with a Cree XP-G, XM-L, XT-E, etc that will provide a good cutoff. I've looked through all of the LEDIL ones and found some good streetlight ones, but nothing that would be decent as a car headlight low beam. Any suggestions
 
Why not buy one of the existing lights by Hella or Trucklite? What environment do you plan to use it in?
 
Dumb question, but if you are using it off-road, why do you care about cutoff?

Semiman
 
AnAppleSnail said:
Why not buy one of the existing lights by Hella or Trucklite? What environment do you plan to use it in?
Click to expand...

I'm not looking to spend the huge amount of money that those are, plus i prefer to made something myself instead. It will be retrofitted into an existing housing so i need to be able to control the size and shape of it.
 
best you can do is use pre-existing optics available on the aftermarket or scrapyards, and hope you can get your luminosity high enough to match a filament. google upashi's experiments on hidp, he did some work breaking down which parts of an old TSX projector bowl contribute to which parts of the beam. Generally speaking, good place to start.

Alternatively, what if you used available TIR lenses and then cut the final output, or tried to beamshape the final output a la koito reflective beam shaper? You'd have an ugly dim spot right under the cutoff, but at least more light be going forward.

I'd reckon you might want to stick to engineered, pre-built solutions, though. How things are illuminated makes a difference in what driving decisions you make, and in something where you are pushing the limits of human reaction and machine action, perhaps it just might be safer to use an off-the-shelf approach.

Why did you want to go with LED, for starters? Would perhaps HID be a viable option?
 
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you wont find any widely available optics with cut off, i used pbly hundreds different lenses in my builds, not car related, not one lens had any cut off, oval lenses also wont work for driving lights. just get lights that are made for cars , off road or not, just from building a light standpoint it isn't such an easy task to build one suitable for rough off road use, vibration\moisture..... will destroy flimsy build light in days. and to make a good one, you will spend even more money and lots of time, so at the end it will be cheaper\faster and more reliable to buy one already made for that purpose, there are some great lights on the market. i would understand if you wanted to build something that is not manufactured, but it is not the case.
 
alpg88 said:
you wont find any widely available optics with cut off, i used pbly hundreds different lenses in my builds, not car related, not one lens had any cut off, oval lenses also wont work for driving lights. just get lights that are made for cars , off road or not, just from building a light standpoint it isn't such an easy task to build one suitable for rough off road use, vibration\moisture..... will destroy flimsy build light in days. and to make a good one, you will spend even more money and lots of time, so at the end it will be cheaper\faster and more reliable to buy one already made for that purpose, there are some great lights on the market. i would understand if you wanted to build something that is not manufactured, but it is not the case.
Click to expand...

Amen! My light is far from flimsy, it'll actually be (my own version of) IP68 when I'm done with it, but I can't count how many hours I've put into it anymore.

But hey, it really is fun to make your own, especially when you've the CNC's to do so! :nana:

I also don't know of any TIR's with a cutoff. You'd have to pay some big bucks for an Optical Engineer to design you one or something. Haha.
 
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