Thread: Defender lights upgrade

Originally Posted by DiscoMick

I agree with those who say to upgrade the wiring loom and fit plus bulbs first, before deciding if other upgrades are necessary.
Fixing the wiring loom will improve everything.

Ok to all you guys who give feed back ....great ....thanks ...a few more questions

1) so so I guess what you are saying even if I went to the top priced JW speakers I would still have to upgrade the wiring loom with a Traxide kit anyway ?

2) also if I got the Traxide loom are they hard to wire up ......do you need to run the wire all the way to the battery or is there some where under the hood you can tap into a power source ...... the wire holes out of my battery box are pretty full up with leads for auxiliary power to the back and fridge etc .....I could drill another hole ....but like to keep holes to the battery box to a minimum

3) if I upgraded to the Traxide loom .......what bulbs would I fit ( halogen ? ) to the existing reflectors
....anyone have a part number

4) I assume these bulbs would be dipped and high beam all in one ?


I already have a pair of light force LED driving lights fitted for country driving and I find them to be great .........but when I dip them it's like driving into a black hole with the current OEM Defender lights
....also around town they are terrible

thanks again .....great advice

Well I really hate to come late to this perpetual debate, but I will only chime in with actual experience.

Many years ago, when the HID thing was relatively uncommon (2007-ish) I had an offer from the innovision (philips) rep to test a set of H4 HID inserts in my SL.

The SL was ideal, because it complied with the ADR's for the lens washing and levelling.

I did a lengthy writeup on it at the time for the guys over on ozbenz.net I considered them at the time to be far superior to the halogen offerings - most of which I had already tried - plus 80's crystal vision, 110/130W, 160W.... yes Mercedes use ceramic connectors and glassfibre sheathed high temp heavy gauge wiring as standard - what a joy... Certainly no Landrover wiring in that car.

Some context needs to be applied to the discussion however, before I proceed further:

1. globes in an R107 SL mercedes are right up there with being the singularly most stupid service item in the history of mankind.

Granted they were long-lived and well isolated from vibration, and were height adjustable from the cabin, but they are an absolute bugger to replace. Seriously, people complain about TD5 oil filters and stuff... try changing a 107 light bulb at the side of the road - in the daytime! forget it.

This - combined with the promise of far greater lumen output from HID, led me to try them.

Now, The truth is, they WERE better. and the Mercedes, unlike your average POS JDM buzzbox, does have excellent reflector and lens design, so the beam scatter was not disasterous, and throw was good, with clean cutoff lines. It ought to be - bosch made the lenses and reflectors. and they are hellishly expensive things to replace.

The disappointment was the effort required to install them properly, plus the infamous mercedes dash 'bulb warning light' which monitors all the illumination circuits ( park, indicator, low, high fog, stop and brake lamps) and triggers an orange idiot light in the dash when the current sensing goes half an ohm outside the freaking circuit rating.... ok slight exaggeration but not really - you know what ze chermanz are like. Precise!

Well about 5 years on, the ballast on one side decided enough was---- enough. while the bulbs were absolutely fine, the ballast type had discontinued. SO.... that led me to Theretrofitsource - who actually found me an OEM denso 55w ballast and made the appropriate adaptor harness. I was back in business after 2 weeks. No big deal - I don't drive the SL much. but what a cockup. I was not pleased with Philips.

But the disparity in colour temperature between the main beam and the fog lamps annoyed me. so I had a set of H3 HID globes and ballasts to match fabricated.

by now, the retrofit source guys are wanting to know how I'm doing all this stuff - because they want to make a retail kit.... when I told them, they said...uh no way dude. too much outlay. Pity, because they are actually good..... except for one situation.

raining wet roads after dusk. more importantly, poorly marked poorly illuminated raining wet roads after dark.

There is simply too much diffraction and not enough reflection in that higher temp area of the colour spectrum to be effective.

Now the first reason is the globes colour temperature was a little too high - 6000K.
The second is the HID is a reflector style, and that design simply does not work with a gas discharge arc lamp (under 500w) in wet conditions.

Heat was not an issue in the Mercedes. the housings are all metal. So... what did I do?

Yes I still run them, but I have since changed the globes for a special german Osram 4600K temp globe element in a custom ceramic housing. - not an off-the-shelf ebay cheap H4 kit.
IMG_0005.jpg

You get what you pay for is the answer to all those who believe that HID is junk. But oh boy - The outlay on this car, just to make it "right" was an exercise in futility. I didn't waste money - I wasted time and effort AND money in destructive testing.

The reason HID headlights ****es so many people off, is because people do not install them to comply with ADR's, they use junk plastic / polycarb relfectors with worse than poor beam scatter, and no cutoff, which blinds oncoming drivers.

When correctly installed, the HID headlights ARE effective, and they DO have excellent penetration - except when it is wet - which is the downside of all HID's - even the very expensive hella / denso projector designs.

So lets move forward, and slightly backwards at the same time.....

I happened to have another 107 - but it was an SLC.
when I bought it, it had the US style sealed beam (5.25") aka H1 separate low and separate high. Very uncommon.
Lurch-US-H1conversion.jpg

As you can see from the above picture, There is no doubt an opportunity exists to have an awesome incandescent setup... especially when you see 4 separate headlights...

which is why (if you look carefully) when this pic was taken after the setup was converted to H1 insert Hella reflectors, I am running a standard 'wide' high beam pattern on the "low" and a pin-beam (aka aircraft landing light) 100W insert on the "high" (the high beam is on the inside). Some fiddly stuff had to be done with mouting tabs on the reflectors to fit the high beam spread into the outer housings, but it wasn't major surgery, and could easily be swapped out.

These heavy parabolic hella reflector designs are incredibly powerful with long-throw, and when you use a proper 100W rally halogen globe in them, they are really somewhat ludicrous. We measured 2 lux @ 1.32km on a straight stretch of the old princes highway one night not long after installing them (2008). In fact, I have to say, they just about have to be the most pleasing setup I have ever used on a car, without having to bother resorting to driving lights..... on that car they were simply not needed - you could not 'outrun' or 'outdrive' that combination. and the fog lamps were plain 55W H3's fyi. Only ever used them for 'looks'

I specifically recall a late night trip home from canberra coming through the southern highlands with the worst winter pea-soup fog I have ever encountered. I couldnt see further than the middle of the broken centreline infront of the car. With the lights on the SLC, I was able to travel @ 40km/hr in relative safety, while most everyone else had parked up with flashing hazards, due to their inadequate lighting. The pin-beam landing lights are what made it possible, because they didn't have the broad scatter of the other beams.

Now, the interesting part for LR owners.

When I purchased the RRC in 2015, one of the first fixes was to replace the crappy 7" H4 inserts which were suffering from moisture damage on the internal reflector and bad haze on the other. Initially I swapped the standard 55/60 globes into some new Hella housings, and was happy - It was after all the very first 'personal touch' I did. It cleaned up the look of the car, and made it look 'new' - to me at least.

But then I discovered how pathetic the pommie wiring is. I expected a lot more from the lights, and knew they could be better - So I re-wired the car. Put in a second battery, isolator etc etc ad infinitum...

That also included some quite heavy gauge cable to the headlights with new ceramic H4 connectors, so all were now all high-current fused circuits on separate solid state relays for low and high beam on each side (4 relays) - because I was going to put in some massive wattage globes.

With that said, the lights were adjusted 'down a lot' to prevent oncoming dazzle - as I'm not the kind of bloke who likes to blind drivers - unless the idiots refuse to dip their beam... you know the kind of person I'm talking about, I am sure.

Again, Quite satisfied with the output - and I have covered it elsewhere on here. The globes were swapped a few times, until I found a set I was pleased with - ended up being 90/130W and then 110/160W when I was finally satisfied with the high beam dipping to low wasn't leaving me night-blind.
DSC_4061.jpg
But I was certainly not happy with the IPF driving lights.

So I replaced them with a pair of great whites LED's that I already had. I covered this elsewhere on here in another thread.
DSC_4170.jpg

The difference was immediately noticeable - the 160W H4's high beam was like a candle compared to these LED's but still obviously better than the standard. I was quite flabbergasted at the time, thinking how I believed that IPF made excellent offroad lighting products.... It was simply astounding the difference. and so was the cost!!!!
Which is why I will certainly caveat this monologue with the edict that at the time, I was prepared to spend the money on the highest quality I could afford - and even then I thought they were absurdly expensive...

Since then, I have had a lot of 'interesting' fun with the electricals - when the bridge rectifier avalanche diode pack somehow dead shorted across the windings and drained the battery almost overnight, and then 6 months later, the brand new replacement alternator internally dead-shorting the winding (heat from engine bay plus high current draw from lights + winching + fridge +trailer etc.) after driving through a puddle.... yes, a puddle on a sealed road - the kind that kids would stomp in to splash their friends....

This has led in recent months to some changes in the electrical system as the replacement 120A lucas style alternator which failed- (piece of junk - made in australia too I might add.....) could not be rebuilt- (seriously wtf?) nonetheless, it presented an opportunity as no suitable replacement could be found, so I was credited with the funds - (a refund was offered) and I spent the money on a few "upgrades" (I still haven't found a suitably decent alternator - I'll probably modify a Mercedes one since I have a couple laying around)

The first was a set of Great whites LED 7" projector LED replacement headlamps, after testing them side by side on the car against the JW speaker evo 2's. The second was an LED light bar which I have not yet fitted.

I liked the JW speaker evo 2, but they simply could not match the beam accuracy of the great whites, had worse low beam scatter and weren't as bright (and they cost more at the time).

So, that's what sits on the front as of now - and the throw, the spread and the intensity is better than the 160w halogens.

IMG_6256.jpg

Now I'm a halogen fan. I like the natural tungsten filament glow.

BUT.

I also like to minimise my current draw, and like longevity that LED provides.

While I personally have had excellent results from Great Whites, I have other brand LED's on the vehicle and those are also high quality. The only incandescent globes that remain are the illumination for interior switches and cluster gauges - because I prefer it that way.

One day, I will probably revisit the love of incandescence. But not on the RRC. It is well equipped with more light than I need. In fact the second pair of driving lights are totally redundant since putting in the LED headlights - That is how seriously good the upgrade is. and You wouldn't just say that about a pair of 18LED driving lights unless you actually saw how good the headlamps are.

I'm always open to improving the lighting on my vehicles, and this is the best 4x4 setup I've installed to date. I know that I could have bought fyrlyts etc, but the current draw and voltage required to bump the lumen output up to the max was simply not worth it. With the LED's I have a warranty against failure, and a guarantee of tens of thousands of hours. They're probably going to outlast the vehicle - they have already outlasted one of them......

So as long as people understand that there are 'horses for courses' it is the same with HID, LED and Incandescent lighting. Each type of lighting has it's niche where it outshines the others. The problem is the differences are no longer 'massive' and the performance versus price versus quality argument is always going to be budget-oriented.

I would stick with incandescent globes if I was not running seriously evil gibber-laden tracks at night and my budget was limited.

I would install HID long-range pin beam driving lights, if I had a reasonable budget and wanted longevity and minimal maintenance (globe replacement).

I would install LED for spread-beam driving lights over incandescent or HID every single time.

I would install LED headlights, if I had a healthy budget - as the low-end ones simply do not cut the mustard with respect to performance, when you can get better output from a good standard hella h4 reflector and a pair of high quality halogen globes...

I don't feel that halogen driving lights represent value for money when you consider the electrical load for the equivalent light output these days. However, they DO have a more comfortable colour spectrum when compared to the poor balance of cheaper HID and LED products.

While my greatest bugbear is the intensity of LED reflective light from street / highway signs and other road furniture, the singular area which kept incandescent globes in my headlights, I have to say that the design, spread, light output and lack of dazzle in the 7" LED headlamps I have fitted a few months ago have far exceeded my requirements and I have to admit I am not looking back, and can see a lot further now.

I hardly have cause to engage the driving lights, and that is what surprises me the most.

But I am a sucker for a nice pair of driving lights, so don't be surprised if my roofrack ends up with some crazy setup in the future. Whatever it is, it will be totally unnecessary, except for the most remote area night work.