Originally Posted By: wrcsixeight
I apologize for my insulting words, DW.
However, you mechanical aptitude does not make you a qualified lighting expert.
Qualified Automotive lighting experts do denigrate the path you have chosen.
YOu do have more forward facing lighting with your 'upgrades', but can you actually see better, or do you have a false confidence that the increased amount of lighting gives you?
Headlights are not just forward facing spot lights, but are optically engineered to give adequate lighting where needed with minimal negative effects to oncoming drivers. Granted this is not always done very well by automotive manufacturers who weigh profit against what they can get away with.
The beam pattern, and Aiming is very precise and has huge effects on the ability to see things on the road ahead.
It has been pointed out to me on a forum that does have Automotive lighting experts on it the pointlessness of bringing up the above points to people who have chosen your path of unfit bulbs into halogen housings.
I had hoped to keep a few people from choosing/following your method, as I am sick of being blinded by those with HID or LED in incandescent housings as I am sure others are too.
I am also afraid to Highbeam flash them because that would likely earn me even more blinding and glaring light requiring that much more recovery time. So just because nobody flashes you, it is not necessarily because they find your lighting to be fine, but because they do not wish to find out how obnoxiously glaring your retrofit LED/HID bulbs can be on high beam.
The stories of gangland initiations where members drive around with their high beams on and wait for somebody to flash them are well known, and likely keep those from flashing glare offenders.
Again I apologize for my insulting words. It was late and I'd had a few and have strong feelings on this subject.
Daniel Stern is the foremost lighting expert on the web.
To others, with open minds, who are still trying to find the safe legal way to actually see better out their windshield, please do some reading over here:
http://www.danielsternlighting.com/tech/bulbs/Hid/conversions/conversions.html
Those who have already done the HID/LED retrofit into incandescent housings will never believe their upgrade is in fact a downgrade, and I'll no longer attempt to convince them otherwise.
Good day
I understand that your posts are well-intended, but the problem is that the devil is in the details, and you are lacking a few of the details.
First of all, the link you provided above refers to H5006 (5.75"), H6024 (7"), and rectangular sealed beam headlights that have been replaced with "crystal" or "diamond cut" headlight housings, in order to be able to use a replaceable headlight capsule.
The problem with these conversions (aside from some ECE housings, like Hella, and CBE), is that they just plain don't work well at all. And the supplier listed in the report is DEFINITELY not a retailer of either quality brand.
I went through this whole thing myself, when I got my first 68 Dodge. I, like many people, purchased those "crystal" housings, only to discover that they were actually worse than the stock H5006 lights with H4 halogen bulbs in them. I then converted them to HID, and they actually did in fact become worse.
I ended up getting a different system that was a complete reflector/bulb/ballast package, all engineered together for xenon lighting. The system cost me $600 at the time, but worked a million times better, and gave me a true cutoff beam pattern.
Nowadays, I have the complete quad-light set from JW Speaker on my 68 Charger, much to my satisfaction. This, however, involved cutting my stock headlight buckets, so I had to get a spare revolving headlight set, cut them, and restore them, so I could keep the originals. All told, I have almost $2000 invested into the setup.
Now, beyond that, the report is using some cheap HID kit from 2002.
Alot has changed since then, especially the quality of OEM reflectors. My Jeep, despite being halogen, and not being terribly bright, actually had a very decent beam pattern. Adding an HID system, which no longer uses ancient bulbs guaranteed to have the wrong focal point for a conversion.
After I completed the conversion, I found that the factory hot zone was maintained. There was a light glow slightly above the hot zone, but at the factory aiming distance, it was barely noticeable. I found that I had to crouch down before the beam became offensive to my eyes, at 10 feet. Beyond that, I would have had to sit on the ground.
There is no doubt that I can see better. In driving down the same dark streets I would normally find myself one, particularly A1A during turtle nesting season, when they reduce or completely cut off the street lights, I could obviously see far more, and at far greater distance than I could before. This was very easy to tell, because my stock lights showed me next to nothing. For the first time, I could see the dog walkers, joggers, skaters, and bicyclists without hitting my high beams. With stock lights, it just wasn't going to happen, until they were nearly at my fender.
I understand that a lot of science and research has gone into the statements that these pros are making, but the simple scientific fact is, that the results of any experiment only apply to situations having same conditions and parameters of the original experiment. You know this. We're talking 8th grade science, here.
The only way to entirely invalidate HID conversions into halogen housings is to test them all. Can you deny this, or are you going to make me break out my high school material and show you just how an experiment is run and how the results apply?
The reason you cannot convince people that they are wrong, is because
you aren't right.
You're sitting in a remote location, having no idea of the specifications of the equipment, new or old, and you're telling people what is going on with their car, having exactly no basis for telling them what is going on. Nobody does. Not you, or Daniel Stern Lighting.
Furthermore, more of the reports listed as examples of HID kits being evil, refer only to manufacturers who made false claims about obtaining DOT certification.
Daniel Stern Lighting may be a legitimate lighting engineering firm, but the whole article is a bunch of worry-warting and sticklering. Despite their Chicken Little perspective toward HID conversions, the world has not ended because of them.
But as I said, neither Daniel Stern, or anybody can be the judge of that, because they have not done enough testing to be able to say either way.
But there will always be haters of any product, who will come out with their isolated facts and slap them together into untested theories, and proclaim them correct. And if any of their shocking reports were right, I would have gotten cancer from Sweet N Low, lost my fertility from bicycle riding, been blinded from working in low-light environments, would be serving a new Islamic government because of my president, and gotten enlarged knuckles from continual use of my hands.
Everybody has a "report" with "the facts" proclaiming apocalypse from something that they really just don't like.
My guess is that Daniel Stern Lighting has lost a lot of business to the metal halide/xenon market, and hasn't been able to adapt. So just tell everybody the new way is completely evil, and hope the business comes back.
