Yeah...my many hours of knuckle busting/skin ripping labor payed off. I was very pleasently suprised by how well I can see with my cibie lenses, 90/100W narva H4's, and fireproof 4 gauge wiring kit. It was better than I was expecting...it was everything iceshark promised. I hadn't taken my car on any backroads for spirited nighttime driving for a while because of how badly deteriorated my stock lighting set up was. I could drive around all night with my highbeams on and nobody would flash me. Those days are gone.

The amount and quality of lighting from the upgrade rivals that of a couple of benzes, acuras, and audi's I have ridden in with HID lights...just no cool blue look. I found myself wincing from the amount of light reflected off of road signs with the highbeams on. It is incredible. I have never piloted a car at night with such amazing lighting. The e-code beam pattern is much much better than the DOT crap they have over here (are these lenses DOT legal?)...it lights up higher and farther to your right with the low beams on, where you should be more concerned at night...it gives you a lot more lit area without blinding oncoming traffic. With the highbeams on, I can see probably 1/4 mile or more ahead of me on a flat straight road.

Anyways, if anybody is disappointed with their stock lighting, I highly recommend you pick up the wiring kit I got from iceshark (if he still is making them) as it has everything you need minus 2 sheet metal screws, and pick up some cibie lenses and narva bulbs from him, too. It is a world of difference.

Oh...I took a couple of pictures. My digital camera sucks and compensates for low light by making the picture crappy, but you can see even with the crappy pictures some of the difference.

 

ribs - looks sweet! i couldn't take advantage of dan's lighting package this time around. i just hope that there is a "next time"

btw, is that roadkill?

<img src="graemlins/beerchug.gif" border="0" alt="[cheers]" />

 

haha it looks like he's ready to cook some roadkill pussycat. great lights. id like to do something similar but if I did it myself Id need the book for dummies at my side.

 

What sort of crummy pictures are those, Ribs?!!

Ben's look better and all he got were the Cibies and bulbs. Anyway, thanks for the nice comments and glad you are happy. You are lighting up well over a mile in front of you, BTW. I'll toss in a pair of some stainless #10 pan head sheet metal screws on future kits. And no, this setup is not legal, more or less anywhere they have laws. The E-Code lenses are legal in a few States and all of Canada. The 90/100 watt bulbs? Forget it, except for outback OZ or Alaska. That is why I want you to aim them correctly. Then you will be just fine due to the sharp cuttoff control. If you aim them too high you won't be getting flashed, you will see cars going into the ditch.

UDPride, the kit isn't all that hard to install, but it is a pain in the *** to dig down to the alternator. Just work, nothing particularly skilled about it.


bron, the latest build is being done this weekend. Then I will be out of parts and Cibie lenses. I have a couple spots left in this run that haven't been paid for. The next time I can build is first part of July due to delivery of the Cibies. And Delphi is going to make me buy some parts in real industrial world quantities, so we are looking at 50 headlight kits, or just jacking up the price, again, to cover that. Probably be $5 or $10 bucks a kit if we have a low volume of buyers. If we get enough takers between here and July, then we have another major build.

 

Just my .02: Dan, great job! I installed my full boat lighting kit last weekend. Yes it was relatively easy, and the difference is freaking amazing. The only glitch was me forgetting to hook up the grounds for the passenger side light (Dohhh!).

 

I got so frustrated trying to hook up the ground to the same place as the rest of the passenger's side grounds that after 45 minutes of struggling with it I finally hooked up the pass. side ground to the bracket for the light-flipper-up-bar. Seems to have worked fine.

I still can't get over how much better the lighting is in my car...since I haven't fully set up my suspension yet (still too lazy to install rear torsion bars) I will have to say that this is the best driver oriented mod I have done to my car yet. The installation of the wiring kit wasn't particularly hard...it just took a long time and involved getting shoulder deep into strange parts of your car. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get the alternator plastic shroud out of the car, so I drilled it inside the engine bay. I don't know if I mentioned this in a previous post or not, but it is much easier to run the wires if you pull off the two or three 10mm bolts holding on the black plastic trim piece underneath and behind the intercooler/front fascia (you will know what I am talking about when you are trying to fish it through there...not the bellypan/scratchguard, either), contort the trim piece so you can slide your hand into it, and feed it that way.

Just be warned that you will probably scrape the **** out of your hands/arms in the process of installing the wiring...I am left handed, and look what happened to me:





I think I got off easy, too. Good luck with your installs everyone!

 

That's how both my arms looked after installing the reference sensors in my car... I have a genuine heap-big grown up job now and I get some strange looks from the suits with all the bandages on my hands...

Thaddeus, probably not executive timber

 

[quote]Originally posted by IceShark:
<strong>What sort of crummy pictures are those, Ribs?!!

Ben's look better and all he got were the Cibies and bulbs. Anyway, thanks for the nice comments and glad you are happy.</strong><hr></blockquote>

I actually got the voltage regulator, too. I put that in the weekend before last when i was changing all my coolant hoses. damn was that a BITCH!!. It took me an hour holding the handle of a little inspection mirror (like dentists have) in my teeth and cursing heavily to get it in place. it has to be pushed in at just the right angle to compress the new brushes. btw, i thought the old one i took out weighed about twice as much and looked a lot more sturdy... but those brush contacts were getting mighty short.

my battery voltage under minimal load went from 13.0 to 13.3 volts. I haven't checked the headlight voltages yet.

I also removed the marginal (~6 gauge?) wire from the alternator and hooked up a piece of 4 guage. Right now it just is connected back to the original smaller conductor so nothing is different except for a few extra feet of wire. but now i can put in a power distribution block to connect amps, headlights, etc without having to dig all the way down to my alternator again. thanks for that suggestion, dan.

and i found that the guys in the stereo shop out back at circuit city are pretty nice and let me use their slick ratcheting crimper to put the lugs on my wire... so if any of you are looking for an alternative to my old method of crimping 4 guage lugs (vise grips and a hammer) you might try that. they even gave me a bunch of split loom for free, too.