hey guys, i am finding my high beams a little lacking, they are not yellowed and the bulbs are new. low beams work good enough its mostly high beams or long range lighting i am wanting to fix

i am wondering if projector HID headlights, like the ones i asked about in an earlier thread would be better for this or some offroad lights. i work at a John Deere dealer and can get their offroad lights for about half price, i am not sure how many lumens they are exactly but the video we play in the front lobby shows 3x farther than stock. the cost of each one headlights retro kits are about 300 to 400 dollars while i can get these offroad lights for 150 each, i do know that you can melt theshey guys, i find my truck lacking in the long range or high beam lighting ability. the housings are clear, not old and yellowed and the bulbs are new. on dim i love them, they give a nice broad view and often i can spot animals eyes shining in the ditches, so i mainly want to have better long range visibilty.
e offroad lights with a torch for up to 35 seconds and they will still work and they are drop tested at 30 feet, with off road lights i would also build a headache rack to mount them on, but i am going to build the rack either way for when i haul my firewood.

any opinons or experiences would be awesome, thanks

 

3x farther than stock what? Tractor headlights? That would be like 300 feet instead of 100. Lol. Tractor lights are made to see what's directly in front of you and to the sides, not a 1/2 mile down a road. Same for MOST other lights sold as "off-road" except there are some out there that are made for long range but with those you have to consider beam shape. A lot of the long range lights give a pretty focused beam, so that ain't much use for driving unless you aim them inwards. Left one aimed slightly right, right one aimed slightly left. That gives you illumination on both sides and a nice hotspot in the middle where the beams cross. I think canadian locomotives have their ditch lights set up like this.

Nobody will appreciate you driving towards them with any of this... please be courteous and turn them off when someone comes towards you.

 

3 times longer than the road lights of a tractor which are comparable to a trucks. I will for sure turn them off at the first sign of headlights. I was also wondering if I would have to cross beam them but didn't know for sure

 

Have you considered putting relays on your headlight power feed? With stock wiring the power for the lights goes through a pretty long path, including the light switch and some relatively small wires. That results in some voltage drop, which means your lights aren't as bright as they could be.

Take a volt meter and check the voltage at your high beam terminal at each light and compare it to the voltage reading you get at the positive terminal of the battery. Do this with your engine running (preferably above idle) to get a realistic reading of what the battery voltage is with the alternator working. If the voltage at the light is significantly lower than at the battery you have some cheap easy gains available.

On my son's J**p Cherokee we were getting a little over 10V at the headlights compared to about 14V at the battery. I put relays on both the low and high beams. The difference was remarkable! Stock the low beams seemed like you only had the parking lights on. With the relay my son kept thinking he had high beams on when it was just the low beams.

 

The way to measure "voltage drop" is actually paralleled or across the cable or connection under load, and not the battery voltage at the terminals per se.

For example to measure the drop across the negative side, place one voltmeter probe on the negative battery post and the other on the negative terminal of the headlight. Turn headlights on. The voltage indicated should not exceed around +0.2 (two tenths) of a volt. You can narrow things down by measuring the drop between the negative battery post and negative cable terminal itself, or battery post and the engine block, etc. Measure positive side in the same way.

I don't have any problems with relays but if there is a four (4!) volt difference for example, then the actual problem is serious corrosion with the grounding, cables, and connections, they didn't come that way from the factory. Replace cables and straps, grind connection surfaces to bright shiny metal and tighten securely. Very common problem with vintage iron. Beware paint interfering with current transfer on restored vehicles and causing a similar issue. Note too, if the headlights are being starved for current then to some degree so are the ignition and accessories.

High resistance in the wiring and grounding also puts heavy strain on the alternator and charging system. Get the vehicle grounding and connections straightened out first, and then see (literally) what you think. Any relays installed afterwards if desired will work all that much better, too.

 

You can do it that way too, but comparing the voltage at the headlight terminal to the voltage at the battery gives you the same thing (in both cases with the black wire of the volt meter to a good ground, like the battery negative post). But yes, that only deals with voltage drop in the supply wires. There could be a voltage drop in the ground as well (but typically there's more on the positive side).

All good advice, and yes, a 4 volt difference is horrible and indicates problems. But in my case that was after installing a new battery and cables, and cleaning the connections well. So the problem was somewhere in the smaller wiring. Trying to track that down gets to be a nightmare, so at that point going with relays starts to look a lot more attractive. And it doesn't necessarily mean that everything else is getting starved for voltage since everything else doesn't necessarily use all of the same wires (other than the main battery cables).

I agree 100%. I had already done that in the case of my son's Cherokee, but did not point it out in my earlier post, assuming that had already been considered (but I probably shouldn't assume).

 

In that case the problem lies in the headlight switch itself, or the floor/dimmer switch, there's no way a voltage drop like that is inherent to the wiring.

 

Probably true (and in my first post on this I did mention the light switch before the wires for a reason).

But also keep in mind that I'm not talking about one of my Fords here, I'm talking about my son's J**p Cherokee, and I see a TON more threads on the J**p boards about dim lights than I do here, so clearly (pun intended) J**ps are more prone to significant problems in that area than Fords.

However, also keep in mind that I was just offering a free suggestion for checking to see if a cheap fix would be helpful in the OPs case. I'm not saying that relays always make a huge difference, or that he shouldn't consider auxiliary lights. Just that a few minutes of poking with a volt meter MIGHT be able to save him some money.

 

After reading about Fords Flickering light effect, I did research on how to avoid it and came across many good articles describing how the voltage drops significantly through our current electrical setups.

I haven't done the relay mod yet, but have everything ready when I quit tinkering with all of my side projects.

Search "Whiter Whites, Brighter Brights" and that should help with the idea of using relays on our OBS trucks.

 

Absolutely, relays have their place. My point is simply these trucks didn't come from the factory with dim headlights or huge voltage drops, that never happened. It's a symptom of an underlying problem that, in my opinion, should be remedied first. Shiny connections=Happy electrons. See where I'm goin' with that?