My New Headlights

[starfire]

Thought it was about time to show off my new headlights. Thanks to Monza Harry for the headlight buckets that I had to carve up to make these fit (saved my original along with the original headlights in case I ever want to go back). The new headlights are 60/55w Halogen H4 Bulbs. The LED's are wired into the switched lug of the fuse box so they come on when the car starts up and go off when the car is turned off. I like the way it looks, and I really like having daytime running lights on it.

Sacrificial headlight buckets. They look rough. Got the headlights out (not an easy task, the screws were pretty rusted in) and gave them a good cleaning.


Headlight buckets cut up. My dremel did this job like a dream:


Cut up headlight buckets painted (used rust converter paint, then satin finish black) and awaiting installation:


Cut up headlight buckets installed:



Car off:


Car on:



Car on, headlights on:



Car on, brights on:


Close-up:


This project was actually completed about a month ago, just getting around to bragging about it now

[chevyart]

beautiful looking car. never really looked at a starfire before. car looks like new. nice work art

[starfire]

Thanks Art, still have a long way to go on it, but I agree, they are beautiful cars. The next big project will be repainting the bright trim around the windows, windshield, and hatch glass back to black. A lot of the black has come off. I think getting that repainted will really help it look great.

[chevyart]

these cars are definitely going to be collector cars because there are so many getting out into the public, finished off like yours, and all the other nice cars that our forum members have rebuilt. the only fault i have ever found in all these nice cars is the fact that most of them have such small rear tires in those beautiful wheel wells. i also think the streamline design of these cars was ahead of their time. art

[Lunatic]

I too like the subtle headlight mod. It looks a little more modern without being to drastic. Very nice car indeed! I cannot wait to start working on mine as it's been around 18 years since I last had one on the road.

[gerbsinmd]

That looks awesome. I've been trying to figure out how to add daytime running lights to my car. Can you tell us more about those lights? I'm very interested in what they are out of, what kind of wiring mods you had to make etc.

[1100kaw2]

Like those lights. Very Cool.

[zzip]

Looks very nice .
Thx for the nice pics .

Peter from Antwerp

[marco_1978_spyder]

At first I cringed and thought...oh no he got one of those cheap ebay light kit's..

But those are cool, I think those would look cool my red car. and the lights seemed bright. Can you take a pic in the dark?

[starfire]

OK,

I bought these lights from Octane Lighting on ebay:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/4x6-WHITE-LED-H ... 35c8dec573

I also bought the wiring kit they sold. I could have made my own harness, but this looked pretty turnkey:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... SIMPLEITEM

and they shipped it for free.

The lights are a straight swap for your current lights, except you have to cut your headlight buckets like I did as the back end of the lights are bigger to accomodate the projector lamps. I unplugged my old lights, removed them, took out my original buckets, put in my modified buckets, put in the new lamps, hooked the new wire harness to the lamps, plugged in the new wire harness to the far left plug of the old wire harness, mounted the two relays, hooked the red power wire on the new harness to my power lug by the brake booster. Hooked the grounds up at the normal spot between the headlights. I had a little trouble at first as the brights would be on when they weren't supposed to, but Octane has great customer service and all it took was a couple of emails and phone calls to determine that one of the wires was in the harness wrong for my application. I just switched the white and black wires on the input side of the new harness and I was good to go.

For the LED's, I got some red 18 gauge wire and black 18 gauge wire, bought some "t" style connectors and ran the wires with connectors from the right headlights over to the left headlights and in the case of the black wire, just grounded it with the headlight grounds (The LED's have two red and two black wires per headlight coming out, so it's kind of a pain to wire up, but if I can do it, anyone can). Then for the red wire I just ran it from the right lights to the left lights then up the inside of the left fender to the firewall. This is where it got tough. I knew I needed to get to the fuse box to hook into a power lug that was switched with the ignition, but the firewall on these cars is tight (my '68 by comparison you can stand back a couple of feet from the car, throw a wire at the firewall and you have a fairly good chance of it going through). I had to run a stiff wire through the grommet that the speedo cable goes through (literally through the grommet, there was no way to run it through the hole the speedo cable goes through, it was too tight. I used a leather punch to go through the grommet, then put the stiff wire through the path the punch made (which had already closed up by the time I pulled the punch out)) then duct taped the red wire to the stiff wire and pulled it through into the driver compartment. From there I connected the wire to the fuse box. Now when I start the car the LED's light up.

I don't know how long these will last. Hopefully a long time. I was fairly impressed with the product and the customer service, so I ordered a set of halo lights for my '68. (http://www.ebay.com/itm/5-3-4-WHITE-LED ... 35da33ac31) and a harness. They just arrived today, so hopefully it won't be long before I have DRL's on my '68 Cutlass S Convertible too.

If you have any questions on any more of this please put them here and I will try to answer them. When I get a chance I will shoot a picture or two of what things look like on the back side of the lights and under the hood.

[starfire]

Marco, here they are at night (sort of dusk actually)



with the brights on:



I will try to get some better pictures tomorrow night when it's really night.

(don't worry about the yellow basin under the car, these two pics were taken when I had my radiator out for recoring, so the yellow basin is just to catch any drips from the engine. BTW, the wiring on the lights is a hell of a lot easier with the radiator out )

[starfire]

Here's the input plug from the Octane harness plugged into the left hand factory light plug (so the light switch still turns the lights on and off, but the lights actually get there power from the relays that are in the new harness and hooked directly to the battery). When I got the kit, the white and black wires were swapped. When I moved them to this position, everything worked. The wires come out of the socket just like any other GM wire (don't know about other makes, never worked on them).



I just taped off the other three original headlight plugs. If I ever want to go back to stock headlights all I need to do is unplug the left plug, untape the other three, take the Octane lights out, take the modified buckets out (or I could leave them, they will work with the stock lights), put my original buckets in, put my original lights in, plug the original harness back in. I had to leave the ground wire for the factory harness connected as the parking lights are grounded through there.

[Monza Harry]

I agree with Alan about that Relay and wiring harness! I too bought this from Octane as it was the same money as building my own here in Canada, and it is a well built system that requires no cutting of the original harness, all pluses to me and I have had Cibie headlights for my Monza since '83, (one of the best investments I have made, you can see with these lights) those reflectors have been discontinued recently. (Bosch are still available) There is a company that sells High End lighting and also carries daytime running light kits, he advises the set-up that turns on the turn signals like some Chrysler cars do as that protects your expensive halogens. I just drive most of the time with my lights on, and have from the mid to late '80's Harry http://www.danielsternlighting.com/home.html lots of worthwhile reading here!

[starfire]

Relays:



Relays from farther back:



Here's where my lights get their power now. It no longer goes through the light switch, but through the relays:



The back side of the passenger's headlights:



Back side of the driver's headlights:

[starfire]

Sorry Marco, forgot about taking the after dark pics.







One thing I've learned, it's really hard to take pictures of headlights at night.