Fox T-Bird/Cougar Forums  

I was just pointed to this thread. I agree that HID lighting is tons better than stock - I did this 5 years back using huge Acura TL projectors (not worth the hassle of using these). With stock headlights, good condition stock fog lights helped light up the road. With HIDs, the foglights do nothing on the road, and only light up things above the cutoff slightly (trees and such). Worth the project imo as our stock lights suck, even with new reflectors, lenses, and 14.4v at the bulb.

1) 3 piece headlights. Doing a single piece front lens is almost as complicated as doing the tail lights. Not doing it is very ugly I would like to tackle this one day, but combining the headlight and inner marker is much easier than making the side marker light wrap around and inward. A proper way to do this would take a HUGE vacuum forming chamber and some far more unique molds to help the piece wrap 270 degrees around the piece. One could probably get away with 180 degree wraps through, since the rear edge of the side markers are nothing spectacular to look at already.

2) I miss the capability of having flash to pass, or other such usage. HID ballasts or bulbs don't like being turned on and off.

3) The ballast/igniters can be a bit of work to mount.

4) HID bulbs have a terrible color rendering index. They do offer more LUMENS and more controlled light, but the CRI is MUCH lower than daylight and filament-based bulbs, like stock halogen. What this means - colors suck and you can't discern things as well or quickly as having a light with a higher CRI. HID is typically 60-70% of the color spectrum of daylight, halogen is up in the 90s, closer to 100. This is terrible for night safety.

5) It isn't LED

I'm trying to build a 3-axis CNC mill to start fabrication work and hope that precision cut parts can be made to use the front optics of HID projectors with 90+ CRI LED emitters (around 3000 kelvin). LEDs have gotten to the point that they are making HID obsolete (30W in led, plus 90% driver efficiency versus 35W hid plus 84% ballast efficiency for the same color temperatures and luminous output) and it's the next logical step for us to go to. So what say you X3? I wish I could start, but between all my other body modifications (tail light Cree XRE emitters at 2W each, versus 27W stock bulb, led trunk lights to replace my CFL tubes, finishing up my carpc install (yay, nearly complete), building a CNC mill/lathe combination (starting), custom dash (less important), covered interior panels (after other interior work), etc...), my front lights are at a standstill. I need to find someone else to help the design and research phase of it all.

Wish you were closer, for some collaborative efforts

Heat sinking and powering the LED array in a compact fashion is the easy part. shaping the output is hard. Regular projector geometries won't work, and available reflectors won't either, still the beam has to be shaped, or it will be a high beam all the time regardless of WHAT the output is tuned to. I'll update soon with pics if the interest is there.

I agree that even in there best form our OEM lights suck. As for the HIDs in the foglight, anytime you put HIDs in place of the halogen bulb, the light pattern is going to be terrible. Halogen housings were not meant for HIDs. Did you put the Tls behind the factory lense? If so I can only imagine what the diffusers in the OEM lense did to your beam and light output.

Flash to pass is nice but not really needed. As long as your HID uses a solenoid and shield to go from low to high beam, after the lights are on, you can flash them as much as you want. Also the newest generation of Morimoto ballasts were designed to handle the quick on/off that happens a lot with new cars and the auto headlight feature.

I didn't have any trouble whatsoever mounting the hardware. We have plenty of room to mount the ballasts, they aren't that big? Not really sure why this would be an issue to be honest?

Got to be honest, I don't understand most of what was typed here. :p It is just something I have absolutely no knowledge of. From my own experience the projectors are a huge improvement and I haven't seen anything from them that would even come close to considering “terrible for night safety”. Terrible for safety was seeing the shadow of my car in my own headlights because everyone's lights were so much brighter than mine. :p

From what I have read though, LEDs have an extreme heating/cooling problem. Car manufactures haven't even really figured out LED headlights. I think Mercedes and a couple of the other high end car makers have started to venture into LED headlights, but it is far from a mainstream tried and tested light. So far from all of the output pictures that I have seen, HID projectors are easily the widest, brightest, most uniform light (just my opinion :p). The light that comes out of the LS430 and LS460 projectors is amazing, it is even a huge improvement over the projectors that I am currently using.

The main components of interest, anyway.  The array throws 120 degrees and is about the size of a nickel plus it's carrier.  I've heatsinked it with the aluminum and copper heatsink from a socket 1155 cpu, so I've got good and efficient dissipation of heat, that should hang out of the back of the housing.  I considered a dual pattern projector, but I'd have to throw the back bowl out and create a custom one based on different needs such as focal length and lens height, as well as cutoff position.

I'm somewhat suprised by the lack of width and distance in this picture. I think I remember reading that the TL projectors were a nice projector. I know it is hard to capture the true quality of beam in a picture but... IDK.

A lot of ballasts that people get are not waterproof. I'm fine with potting the things if they aren't, but moisture sensitivity, and making a clean install, are things that make this all complicated.

Best way to see this is shine a halogen light at a grass lawn.