JDM Headlights for a 93

[Spud-GT]

Are the JDM Turbo Legacy headlights any different than the stock USDM headlights? Glass maybe?

Any good ways to clear them up? I tried to clear them up today by wet sanding and it only made it worse

[Cliff2.2]

ask LegacyMax, he had a tip on how to clear them up.

[vrg3]

YES! They are very different! Do not put JDM headlights on a car driven on North American streets. A quick search for "JDM head*" with me as the author should give you plenty of reasons.

They are glass, but they also are unusable in left-hand-drive countries.

Your stock headlights are actually pretty good -- almost as good here as JDM ones are in Japan. What you need to do is clear up the hazing (wet sanding is a good way to start but you need to get to very fine grits and then clear coat them), get good bulbs, and upgrade the wiring harness.

Here are two threads about clearing up your stock plastic-lens lights:

http://bbs.legacycentral.org/viewtopic.php?t=739
http://bbs.legacycentral.org/viewtopic.php?t=1939

Here is a thread where quality bulbs are mentioned:

http://bbs.legacycentral.org/viewtopic.php?p=34227

Here's a thread about upgrading the harness:

http://bbs.legacycentral.org/viewtopic.php?t=18754

[tris91ricer]

Rock on, Vikash. You just put all my favorite threads right there. I think what i'll have to do in order to achieve those kind of results is get another set of headlights.. I can't have that much downtime, even on a weekend, since I'm always on-the-go.
But I have been planning to do this, as it seems VERY worthwhile.
Thanks again!

[vrg3]

Well, you can do two of the three with only a few minutes of downtime each... Swapping the bulbs is a quick job, and you can build the heavy-duty harness off the car if you just take a few measurements.

[tris91ricer]

yeah, i've got some good bulbs now, they're pretty good. Sylvania XVs.. AFAIK, my harness is ok, but i do think i want to upgrade it, as I don't really like the drain on my alt.. i think its going bad already, thank god for my optima red top, or i'da been stuck and dead somewhere..
No, i just have to make time to scrub 'em up!

[vrg3]

Yeah, the XVs are pretty good.

If your harness is stock, it's not good. The stock wiring is barely usable. Really.

[tris91ricer]

mm. poopy. okay, well.. looks like i have another thing to add to my 'todo' list on my palm..

[Spud-GT]

Can the stock harness handle some Silverstars?

And why do you recommend to stay away from the JDM headlights?

[greg donovan]

they are pointing at the wrong side of the road.

[Spud-GT]

Well I know that. Anyone know where I can buy them at?

[dzx]

If its silver stars your looking for, you can get them at autozone and i've seen them at checkers too. I've got a pair in my car, they work pretty well.

[greg donovan]

Well I know that. Anyone know where I can buy them at?

that is the only reason to stay away from the JDM lights.

[vrg3]

Don't buy Sylvania Silverstars! They're not good! Buy Sylvania Xtravisions instead. They're good.

I don't get it... are you just ignoring the fact that JDM headlights are completely inappropriate for driving in North America?

[entirelyturbo]

Okay, I've got a little free time, I'll explain the problem with JDM headlights in a LHD car, this is what vrg3 has said bazillions of times...

The beam pattern of LHD headlights could be illustrated as such:

______________/

The lights throw a straight beam all the way across until you get to the far right, and the beam pattern shines some light pointing upwards like that. That is to illuminate signs and other things on the side of the road.

Now let's look at RHD headlights:

\____________

Since the edge of the road is on the left side, the beam shines the light upwards on the left to catch signs and whatever.

Now, if you use RHD lights on an LHD car, what will happen?

1) You will not have the upwards beam on the right (you will not be able to see signs and stuff)
2) You will have the upwards beam on the left (you will blind oncoming drivers, regardless of high beams)

If you want glass headlights, get EDM headlights that were on an LHD car, maybe Germany or something. I believe Josh got a set somehow... That will rid you of the yellowing problem without having the beam pattern problem I just described.

[Spud-GT]

Ok, so EDM from a German car it is.

But for the time being, why are the Xtravisions better than the Silverstars.

And just a question, the stock harness can handle both of those bulbs?

[vrg3]

Thanks, subyluvr2212.

Yes, the stock harness can handle both bulbs. They're both stock wattage. But no well-informed person would choose the Sylvania Silverstar.

I've explained before why Sylvania Silverstars are bad, but let's put it in this thread too...

The Silverstars were designed to compete with the rest of the rice lighting market. They're similar to other garbage like PIAA Xtreme White and Wagner Lazer Blue.

They're an attempt to make the signal image from a halogen lamp look more like the signal image from an HID lamp. A halogen lamp has a slightly yellow-white appearance, while an HID lamp has a slightly blue-white appearance.

So how do you make a yellow-white light source look blue-white? Well, you dip the bulb in a blue tint. Great! That blue tint absorbs long wavelengths and transmits short ones. Beautiful.

Except... wait a minute... we already said the spectral distribution of a halogen filament's output is biased towards the longer wavelengths... That means the blue tint is eliminating the strongest part of the filament's output, just to get the weakest part to be more visible! It should be plainly obvious that any tint at all on a bulb will reduce the light output, but a blue tint doesn't just reduce it, it cripples it.

Now, let's carry on... Let's imagine that the light output is still somehow sufficient (with Silverstars, it is indeed high enough to be legal). There are lots of good reasons why biasing your lights' spectral output towards blue is bad.

The human eye has a hard time recovering night vision after exposure to high-frequency light. Try getting a blue flashlight of some type and a comprable red light. Sit in a nearly-dark room and let your eyes adjust to the darkness so you can see what's in the room. Then turn on the blue light. Obviously, with the light you can see more. Then turn off the light and note how long it takes before you can see the stuff in the room again in near-darkness. Do the same with the red light. The time will be much, much shorter. Red light's a lot easier on your night vision. That's why Navy ships use red lights at night, and why you use red-colored flashlights when hiking at night. Strike one.

High-frequency light scatters much more readily in the atmosphere and in the presence of moisture than low-frequency light. Just look up at the sky on a sunny day. The sun emits light of all frequencies, right? But when you look up, the sun looks yellow. What's more, the sky looks blue. The short wavelengths are acting very differently from the long wavelengths. The long wavelengths go mostly straight through the atmosphere, which is why the sun's appearance maintains its shape. The short wavelengths scatter all over, which is why the sky is uniformly blue. If your headlights' light scatters all over the place instead of going where you shine it, you end up with lots of glare, for you and for anyone else who's unfortunate enough to be sharing the road with you. This phenomenon is aggravated hugely by bad weather, be it fog, rain, or snow. Strike two.

The human retina is actually incapable of properly focusing on the short-wavelength component of the image seen by the eye. The retina has three types of light detectors, which are sensitive to short, medium, and long wavelengths respectively. As it turns out, the short wavelength detectors are actually not in the imaging plane on the retina. Because the wavelengths refract differently through the optics in your eye, the blue image lands in a different spot from the red and green ones. The eye focuses on reds and greens, since they're much more important in day to day life, and so the blues are fuzzy and unfocused. You can prove this to yourself by looking at a blue neon light late at night. The edges will always look poorly defined. Strike three.

So anyway... Silverstars are bad bulbs. Their output is crippled by the blue tint on the glass, and the blue-biased light they throw is poorly suited to headlamp usage. Sylvania's not quite as bad as the rice manufacturers, though, so they did try hard to make them usable. They used every trick they had to increase the filament's output so that the crippling effect of the tint would be kept to a minimum. They wound the filament extremely precisely; they used a more sophisticated mixture of fill gases; they very tightly hugged the upper limits of all permissible manufacturing tolerances. They designed a bulb that would be a very good bulb if it were not tinted. Then they tinted it, causing increased glare and reduced seeing. Way to go, guys.

Fortunately for us intelligent consumers, they also sell it in an untinted form. The Xtravision is basically the Silverstar without the tint. It's a good bulb. And, since it's not priced to compete with the rice market, it costs way way less than the Silverstar.

Footnote: There is another bulb out there called the Silverstar. Osram sells it in Europe. It's actually a very good bulb; it has absolutely nothing to do with the Sylvania Silverstar. That's confusing, because Sylvania and Osram are the same company. But that's how it is.

[Flip_x]

I think the Xtravision sucks. i was driving in bad weather and i couldnt see much in front of me. when the road is wet u cant see the light like other bulbs. the only thing that helped me was my fog light that lit up the road.

[evolutionmovement]

I think that's partly a function of our poor headlight design that maybe the bulbs' extra brightness exacerbated. I'm trying to get back on my feet here, and when I finally do I'll finish my headlight project. Nearly done getting the fluting out of the lenses.

Steve

[THAWA]

I have a feeling that's because of your headlights not the bulbs.

Vikash, you should consider creating a new topic, and getting it stickied. Throw all this info that you repost in it and just link people to it.

[vrg3]

Flip_x - What Steve and Hardy said. 90-91 headlights just suck. You simply cannot get adequate performance out of them, no matter what. They have really poor beam patterns.

Also, there is no such thing as a good 9004 bulb (which is what 90-91 models take). 9004XV bulbs (Xtravisions) are just at the top of a bunch of complete losers.

The 9004 bulb specification has several fatal flaws. For example, the base is made of plastic and changes shape with heat, which means it's simply not possible to precisely position the light source relative to the rest of the optics. The high and low beam filaments are very close to each other, so when one is burning the other one typically lights up a little too, which further ruins your chances of a controlled beam pattern. Furthermore, the contacts in the connector are tiny, and have no hope of safely and adequately carrying the kind of current a headlamp requires. Moreover, the filaments are transverse (meaning it runs side to side). This means that most of the light goes to the top and bottom of the lamps, or in other words gets wasted in any headlamps that are wider than they are tall.

Yeah. 9004 bulbs suck.

As a sidenote - No headlight can make you see the road surface in front of you clearly when it's wet. Wet asphalt is a highly specular reflector, meaning it's like a mirror. You can't shine light on a specular surface and hope for it to bounce back towards you. The only thing that you can see reflections from are the raindrops in the atmosphere (this is called glare). Sometimes people mistake glare for "lighting up the road," but really if there's nothing in front of you and it's raining, you shouldn't see anything in front of you.

Steve - I can't wait.

Hardy - That's a good idea... I'll try to compile some of it into a simple FAQ.

[evolutionmovement]

Yeah, it takes some time and decent abrasives, but clearing the headlight fluting is pretty easy and seems very even. Any waviness to the inside of the resulting lens should have a negligible effect on the 90 mm Hellas going in. I have to decide what to paint the housings on the inside, too.

Why is it the worst time for my headlights is highly humid summer nights - more so than rain or foggy days?

Steve

[vrg3]

I don't know. It doesn't make any sense to me that any headlight would work better with fog/rain than without.

[evolutionmovement]

I get less glare, but everything seems much darker as if the air were absorbing the light, not reflecting it. Maybe it's an eye problem.

Steve

[THAWA]

maybe it's something you're precieving as happening.