Big Dave

Does the stock wiring need to be changed in order to work with the 100/80 watt bulbs?

Lizard928

Personally I would say anything over a 65/55 watts you should run extra wires and relays

Bill Ball

I've been running 100/80 for 2 years in my 89. I test ran them with the covers off to see if the sockets or wiring got hot. Not hot at all. Wiring cool. No problems. Probably should check the wire gauge versus recommended for 100/80, though.

Toejam

That's exactly my problem SteveG... the worst part is that my high-beams are as puny as others' low-beams... and my low-beams are like two puddles of muddy light on the road 10 feet in front of my car.

So especially when there's an oncoming car, and I have to switch to low-beams, I cant see anything... driving almost completely blind at times It's not so bad on the 2 lane roads near my house where you only pass a car for a couple seconds, but on the 4 lane highways around here, there are usually just enough cars at night to keep you from using your high beams. So I usually wind up using my fog lights, when it gets bad enough, for any extra light I can get.

And I've seen deer on all of these roads I speak of... I hit one a couple weeks ago in my 928. I am guessing I slowed down to around 30-35 mph. She (the doe) would have probably rolled up on the hood had she not turned back around at the last second. I clipped her with the front left corner, and suprisingly there is no noticable damage.. the blinker acted funny for about 15 minutes afterward, and then started working fine after that (guess the bulb got jarred). I think the very front corners of these cars are pretty strong with so many lines converging on one spot.

One last note: Sometimes if i forget to dim my brights, nobody flashes me... either they're too dim or they're aimed so low it doesn't bother people.

dr bob

Hi Chris--

I think you could use a few minutes of headlight aiming. I noticed when I got my car that the lights were not aimed anywhere close to correct. In fact, my drive home from Denver to LA was limited because both lights were aimed up in the sky. Hmmm. Don't know what that was about. Anyway, did that re-aim, and then had to do it again when I restored the ride height back to specs after a few months of ownership. And that's the point at which you may be. If the car sags over time, and they all do, you headlight aim will get lower also. Check and cotrrect the ride height, and the headlight aim may come back up where it's supposed to be.


The easiest headlight aiming is done on a flat driveway against the garage door. With the high beams on, the center of the main beam pattern should be at the same height and at the same side-to-side spacing as the bulbs are on the car. So, with the car in the middle of the driveway, measure the distance between the two bulbs on the car, and put a masking-tape stripe vertically on the door at half that measurement on each side of the centerline of the car/door. Now, measure up from the ground to the middle of the bulb face on the car, and put a horizontal piece of tape across each vertical stripe on the door, at the same height you measured the bulbs to be.

With the marks on the door, a little darkness to help you see the beam pattern, and the lamps on high beam, adjust the headlight aim as necessary to get that main beam centered on the spot where the tape stripes cross. Throw a towel over the light(s) you aren't adjusting, and cover the auxiliary high-beam bulbs on S4 and later cars so you are only looking at one bulb at a time. Once you have the two lamps aimed like this on high beam, your low beams will be fine.

The same procedure applies to the auxiliary high beams, by the way. Level beam from the bulb to the target will net you the results you need. However, if you use these as flash-to-warn or flash-to-pass bulbs in the daylight hours, you may decide to aim them up a little higher. You sacrifice some road lighting in favore of illuminating trees and phone poles sometimes, but that's not a bad trade-off in the urban driving environment where there are plenty of streetlights anyway.

Foglights get slightly different aiming. They are a flat beam pattern so no side-to-side adjustment, at least on my S4. Correct aim, according to the Great and Socialist State of Arnold Kaleefornia, has the top of the beam pattern no higher than 4" off the pavement at 75' from the front of the car. Since foglights are made to illuminate the ground immediately in front of the car, and only get used when there's very limited visibility distance, there's no need to light up the fog or snow, just the road in front of you. I flaunt this requirement regularly, instead having the lamps aimed level with the ground. I drive with them on all the time in daylight, sort of a poor-man's daytime running lights. I guess I could adapt a common DRL module to give me those dimmed-down high beams in the auxilary high-beam bulbs, but I haven't gotten there yet. In the meanwhile, the foglights do the trick for me.


On the bulbs: 80/100 watt versions of the H5/9004 bulb in the original 8" housings are doing fine now after a few stutter-steps with socket burn/melt. Both the fogs and the aux main beams have 100W H3's in them, with no problems to report. Buy brand-named bulbs, by the way. They are brighter watt-for-watt and also last a bit longer.


One other thing to consider is the age and condition of the bulbs, lenses and reflectors. A new headlight has nice clear lenses, not the stone and sand blasted glass of an old lens. The reflectors are still nice bright reflective silver, not the oxidized to light grey that old reflectors often show. This is also a reminder about why the US has never adopted the Euro standards on bulbs and reflectors-- the reflectors are never exposed to air in a true sealed-beam lamp, so they stay brighter longer. Think about the two sides of a sheet of aluminum foil from your kitchen, and you'll see the difference between the shiny side. the wetted side during manufacture, and the the dull side that's exposed to air as the foil cools. Your headlight reflectors get that same way over time, especially if there's air available. Anyway, for pre-S4 cars with the 7" sealed beams, replacements are cheap and easy to install. For the later cars, or earlier cars with retrofitted 8" assemblies or H4 conversion, the replacement gets a little pricey at $225 to $250 each for the 8" models. Nonetheless, the improvement in lighting is pretty spectacular, and brings your tired. misaimed little candle glows up closer to modern high-intensity standards.


Hope this helps!

BC

Are these Euro 8s a glass reflector? If that they are thats a BIG plus.

Dave H.

cheap but workable. the glass and cut isn't as clear as real Hella's...

those are crap. look at the cut of the lens, there is none! i wouldn't put those on the car if they were free..

also remember, if they're DOT approved, then they're not the Euro H4's! there are US DOT approved H4's, the lenses are cut different than the euros.

get the Hella's with the blue dot in the center...

Toejam

What exactly does the blue dot specify?(you're talking about a blue dot on the lense right?) And what about these Hella assemblies (the 7" flat hella): http://www.928gt.com/Lighting.htm

Thanks for the headlight aiming instructions, dr bob!! I need to re-aim all of my lights I'm thinking.

Oh yeah, and one more thing... I've stopped using my fog lights as of a few nights ago when they started a small flame on my fuse panel which I had to blow out(yes, I made a wish first) I'm not sure why the fuse is acting up like that as I'm fairly sure the bulbs I put in are the correct wattage.

dr bob

A quick look at some 928 wiring diagrams shows that the boyz who designed the circuits are recent escapees from a fuse factory. They put the fuses in some of the right places, but like many cars there is no primamry protection built in. For instance, later American cars have fusible links installed between the battery and the primary fuse bus (usually 30 in the German cars...) but we have none. Good Design Practice says that you need to protect the wiring downstream from the available current upstream. No such luck on the 928...

So whenever you have a short or even an overload in a circuit that hasn't quite made it to the fuses, you have a recipe for fire. For instance, in the foglight circuit you refer to, the fuse is downstream of the switch. If you happen to have a wiring problem, or maybe the tired section with the bad connection is before the fuse but after the switch, you risk a fire every time you turn the switch on.

If you haven't had your dose of wiring smarts yet, take a look forward of the main electric board and see that the same color wier is used for all the internal connections on that board. Rich Andrade mentioned that every wire in that mess has a number on it, so maybe there's hope for repairing a melted/burned conductor after all. All the parts of the panel board, especially the wire connectorts that poke through the holes from the back, are available from such lowly places as Volkswagon dealer parts counters. Many are also listed as 944 parts, available if you take the old one to the P_car parts counter and say "I need a few of these for a 924/944" If you get them started looking fro them in the 928 book/fische, you'll never find them.


Good luck, and I hope you left a little bit of smoke in the remaining wires for next time! Seems like, for what these cars cost new, they could pack a little more in there from the factory.

Dave H.

sorry, the blue dots are only on Hella driving lights, not headlights. just make sure you get real Hella (Hella on the glass) euro H4's...