Can anyone recommend driving lights to mount on my front bumper? I come back from the lake after dark, there aren't many cars on the road but the speed limit is 55+. I want to avoid the critters.

I think the best setups have a relay in the circuit. Any tips out there?

 

Do you want them on with the headlights, or do you want a seperate switch, either way, you will need a relay. I suggest getting 2 relays, and setting up your original headlights on a relay as well. I would try to see if you could find units to mount right in the bumper, so they were flush on the surface, looks cooler.

 

The Cibie' brand is pretty good. More popular with quality is Hella. If you find some shallow, short, and wide models, you can mount them under the bumpers. I did this by using a couple of the big-hatted bolts that fasten the bumper cover to the bumper. I drilled holes into the mounting brackets to match the size of the shoulders of these bolts. Now they hang from under the bumpers, which was why they had to be short and shallow. I didn't want to punch holes in my bumper cover.

 

I've always used Hella lights (and I've wired up a lot of them). If your goal is improved long range lighting so you can see deer and stuff in the road way up ahead, do not mount the lights under the bumper. The lower the lights are, the less distance down range they will shine, especially when the road is not dead-flat. I would mount them over the bumper, or perhaps inset into the grill.

Regarding mounting, if you take the bumper cover off, you'll find that the actual bumper structure is low, lower then it looks with the cover on, so that it lines up better with car bumpers. That means you can't simply bolt the lamps to the top of the bumper cover and have a rigid mount, you'd have to make a stiff bracket that attaches to the bumper tube itself and stands the lamp up above the cover. The mounts do need to be stiff, and they have to attached to the vehicle pretty rigidly to avoid allowing the lamp to dance and vibrate over bumps and stuff. That would let the beam pattern bounce all over the road, which is pretty annoying.

Also, keep in mind that bigger is better - the bigger the lamp's reflector is, the better the beam pattern that can be made from a given wattage of bulb. Given the size of the Aerostar as a whole, a medium to large lamp would look more proportionate. Oh, another thing - a round lamp will always produce a better long range beam pattern then a rectangular or otherwise odd-shaped lamp would.

Lastly, khantyranitar is right about relays and wiring the headlamps. You absolutely need a relay in the driving light circuit to make the wiring safe and to maximize the output of the lamps. And it's always a good idea to wire the headlights the same way, for the same reasons. The factory didn't because they cheaped out. But it's easy enough to rewire, in fact, there are even headlight rewire harness kits out there to make the conversion plug and play.

When I wired the light bar on my Mazda, I installed a 4-relay box on the core support that allowed me to relay the high, low, driving and fog lamps.
(more pics here: http://s19.photobucket.com/albums/b198/expjawa/323/ )
The driving lights in the center are Hella FF1000s, with 130 bulbs in them (if you plan to run high-wattage bulbs, make sure your wiring is appropriate and your alternator is up to the task). The fogs are Hella 500s, with the stock 55W bulbs. With everything light up, I've got locomotive-like lighting .

Further info on lighting in general, read though www.danielsternlighting.com. For info on Hella products, as well as some handy wiring diagrams and info, go to www.rallylights.com.

 

Cool! Thanks for the tips and the links. It's sailing/camping season so I'll be doing this very soon.

 

I should have said that under the bumper is the usual place for fog lights. They have a broad pattern that allows you to see to the sides of the road.

If you can fab a good mount for a large light, and don't care as much for appearance, go for one of these:

http://store.summitracing.com/partde...5&autoview=sku

Sure it's pricy, but you will not be disappointed with its performance. Just one of them lit up will make you wonder whether your regular high beams were on at all. The bonus is that it only needs 35 watts to run, instead of the 55 or 130 watts of the halogen lights.

I've replaced the lights in my Mustang with 200mm H4 housings that have been adapted to use D2S HID bulbs, and I don't even need fog lights anymore. I keep them aimed low so as not to offend drivers in front of me. Check out the pattern at my site:

geocities.com/eycchu

But if I had HID driving lights, I would aim them higher for the distance. But forget about them if there is even the slightest trace of fog in the air. The bluer color of the HID light will scatter a lot more than halogen lights.

If you can't afford HID lights, try to find driving lights that use H1 bulbs. They are much more efficient than the more common H3 bulbs, but they are very rare. Dan Stern might have a source.

By the way, it's true that the larger the reflector, the tighter the beam produced. But most of the time, even for driving lights, you need more than two very bright spots way ahead of you. That's why most light systems will have lenses that distribute the light into more usable patterns.

 

The H1 bulb isn't rare, there are a lot of places you can get them. The site (rallylights.com) I provided the link to sells them and several lights that use them. The FF1000 lamps on my car use the H1 - and you can buy them as a kit (2 lamps, bulbs and harness) off the shelf at Advance Auto Parts (that's where I got mine). The non-HID version of the 4000 that you posted the link to also uses the H1.

Also, more modern lamps use a smooth/clear lens and design the reflector to create the beam pattern. The FF1000 is a good example of this. This is a bit more efficient then making the reflector a simple parabola and fluting the lens to distribute the light, which was of course in turn better then just a clear lens over a parabolic reflector. That would yield the pair of bright spots way down range that you referred to. A well-designed beam pattern for a driving light should be wider then it is tall, and should blend one into the other for a fairly even distribution. A fog pattern will be very wide, but very short - around 300 ft or so. Not very useful at speed...

 

Ford still offers a complete kit with everything you need to add fog lamps
<BR>
E9TZ-15200-A LIST $203.57 FTE $171.00 PLUS SHIPPING
<BR>
Here is the what comes in the kit.
<br>
KIT CONTENTS:
2 E9TZ 15200-B Fog lamp
1 E9TZ 15A214-A Switch
1 E9TZ 15A218-A Bracket (mounting)
1 E9TZ 15A669-A Relay (fog lamp feed)
2 E9TZ 15K233-A Cover
1 Packet (hardware)
<br>
If interested please go to my web page and order!
<br>
Thanks Ed

 

Torsen Rick,

I didn't realize the FF1000 used H1 bulbs. Do you have pictures of their patterns you can show? I need something good that I can use as high beams on my Mustang. I am currently using something that has the homofocal style reflectors like those in the Hella FF lights, but not nearly as good. But I have limited space.

I just found out that the non-HID version Hella 4000 lights use H1. Most places have the kit of two lights and all accessories for about half the cost of one of the HID lights. And based on my own testing, a 100W H1 puts out about as much light as a 35W HID D2S in the same housing. So a pair of these driving lights should work very well, assuming you can find a good place to install them, and you run them with a good set of wires and relay. I was suggesting an HID for a dramatically different light.

Fog lights won't have the distance, but they still light up the sides of the road better than standard high/low beams or auxillary driving lights. Besides, almost all of them use H3 bulbs, so their outputs are not as bright comparitively.

(I love light talk)

 

I've never taken pictures of the beam patterns. I've got the FF1000s wired to only come on with the high beams, so any picture I took would have that in as well. Also, I'm running 130W bulbs, so the output would be greater anyway then they come stock with 55W or with 100W.

But either way, the beam pattern will come as much or more so from the lamp as from the bulb, so a picture of the beam from an FF1000 won't be real relevant compared to whatever you've got on your car. Or were you thinking of putting FF1000s on the Mustang? How would you do that - they're a 7" diameter light. Actually, if its a new GT, they might fit pretty well in place of the stock fogs in the grill, but on any other car I can't think of were you'd put them.

On the Mazda I've shown above, I actually sometimes run the fogs along with the highs and driving lamps. Because the wide beam pattern does light up the side the road well, it gives the car nearly 180 degees of useful lighting. Not a bad thing when you're flinging your car down a twisty dirt road in the dark in the woods...

 

Rick,

The 7" light would be too big to fit into the space available in the nose of an 87 Mustang. I might have to switch to the 5-1/4" round high beams that use H1 bulbs.

Taking this back to Aerostars, I should post the pictures of the light patterns of my van with the E-code H4 lights. They're still using 55/60W H4 bulbs, but they're plenty bright.

 

I've got H4 lamps in my van as well. I also have them in my Capri (the convertible, not the Mustang clone). In that car, I used Hella FF lamps, which are similar in design to the FF1000 reflectors. Even though they're a smaller lamp then the 200mm H4 lamps in the Aerostar, they have better beam disbursal and a somewhat longer range. Unfortunately, Hella isn't yet making the FF model for the 200mm size yet, so I'm stuck with parabolic lamps in that size. Either way, though, they're worlds better then the stock flush-mounted 9004 (9007?) headlamps.