lights and brightness

[jonalexdeval]

I have six 100W halogen KC 4205 (6") driving lights on a windshield mounted light bar. Last summer I was wheeling in the dark and turned them on along with my headlights.

But I have to say I was a tad disappointed. Maybe I just have unrealistic expectations. I mean, I had two facing backwards, so we're talking four 100W plus two headlights, and two of the four were angled outward slightly. But it seemed to be a little less bright than I expected.

I mean, I was expecting a "flood" effect I guess. Like construction lights! The driving lights gave me more of a "pointed" center beam with a surrounding diffused area for each light. Don't get me wrong... they did a pretty good job lighting up the surrounding rocks... but I wanted it to look like a construction zone.

So what kind of lights should I look for? A combination of spot, fog and driving? HIDs? (expensive!) Any good non-HID spots or floods? I was thinking about mounting a spot on my driver's side mirror... any suggestions for a single spot? Thanks...

[tacweapon]

for a single spot light you really cant beat a old police spot light

for a flood of lights the best type of light to get would be flood lights but they are expensive so I use driving lights on the outside of my roof light bar and long rang lights in the center and once aimed properly they do a good job of lighting things up for me.

[RedJeep2002]

or you could do what this guy did LOL. just thought you would get a kick out of it.

[jonalexdeval]

What the... man, I hope my interest in lights doesn't turn into an obsession like that. Are those safety rails mounted to the hood?

So far, I have 8 after-market lights: 2 fogs and 6 driving. But I need to diversify the lightbar up top by adding two floods since I don't like the pattern as it is, moving two of the driving lights to the rear for trail use. I'll be adding a roof rack and mounted all the lights to the roof rack to keep things neat (fogs are up front on the bumper though).

[seatmech32]

Holy crap!! this guy must be running like 3 batteries at least just to power those lights up!

[ReconMill]

For cheap HIDs look into converting a set of hella 500 or 700FFs or something similar. You can get bulbs and ballasts from DDM Tuning for 30 bucks. They wont be as good as the super expensive HIDs, but a ton better than halogen.

[jonalexdeval]

Originally Posted by seatmech32

Holy crap!! this guy must be running like 3 batteries at least just to power those lights up!

Who, me? It's about the alternator, not batteries. I calculated my watt capacity at 684 watts not including vehicle draw. That's all six 100W driving lights. My alternator is 117 amps but I think I need a new 150-160 amp alternator ideally. Any suggestions on alternators?

I'll soon be welding a roof rack and repositioning the lights, hopefully 2 on the rear and the remaining six at the front of the rack... using this as a model (but mounted direct to roll bar):



Yeah, I need to slowly convert to HID... these halogens are killing me! It's too tempting to want to use them all at once. When was the last time you were out at night on a trail and were like "well, I think I'll only turn on half my lights since that's all I need right now". Yeah right!

[jonalexdeval]

Originally Posted by millhouse

For cheap HIDs look into converting a set of hella 500 or 700FFs or something similar. You can get bulbs and ballasts from DDM Tuning for 30 bucks. They wont be as good as the super expensive HIDs, but a ton better than halogen.

I've heard those cheaper HID kits aren't nearly as good. I saw a thread on here reviewing the Eagle Eye HID that looked interesting... $140 per light, which is good for HIDs.

I have 6" KC 4205 driving lights. Any way to inexpensively convert these to HIDs?? Although good HID bulbs are like $80-90 bucks, right? So it's probably not even worth it.