Aftermarket Headlights. Read before asking about them!

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Aftermarket Headlights. Read before asking about them!

Postby Hexa-dB » Tue Jul 17, 2007 11:21 am

Right after seeing so many questions about aftermarket headlights I thought I'd write a quick guide.

OEM Headlights

UK Style
The UK ones are nice because they're glass but on the downside they're 2-piece (separate indicators), and the indicators bulge out a bit. The main beam is in the little round lights rather than the main headlamp unit. Main lamp unit and round main beam lamps use common H4 bulbs.

JDM Style
These are one-piece and made of plastic, similar to some of the aftermarket ones. If you fit these to a UK car you'll have no issues. They have adjusters for left/right alignment and they have side lights. JDM lights have the main beam in the main lamp unit, with the little round lights used as extra "driving" or "auxillary" lights. The main lamp unit uses H4H bulbs which can be a pain to find. Honda can get them in but there's not many aftermarket options - I believe Tokyo Express sell some (possibly PIAA ones?) but they are pricey. The original Honda H4H bulbs are really not very bright at all. In fact they're a bit like having a couple of torches with low batteries on the front of the car!

The downside of JDM lights is that they often suffer from laquer peel. The clear laquer on them starts to peel and can look a bit unsightly, this can be polished up a bit with metal polish which helps but being plastic you have to be careful what you use. The other downside (compared to aftermarket designs) is that the lenses aren't totally crystal clear, they have a bit of a pattern kind of embossed (if that makes sense).
One final thing is that the indicators are orange due to an orange plastic "cup" type thing inside. To remove that you can either attack it through the bulb hole with pliers (smash it and empty the bits out through the hole), or if you're feeling brave you can gently heat the headlamp until the adhesive gets soft, open them up, unscrew the orange bit and reseal them.

Aftermarket headlights

Right before you order a set of those nice black crystal headlights, a few things to consider...

- They are generally built for the LHD market (US/Europe) so they point the wrong way. Compounding this issue is the fact that they don't have left/right adjustment screws. This means that to get them aligned for an MOT you have to loosen the mounting bolts and tilt the whole lamp unit. That can alter the shut lines between the lamp and bonnet/wing. It's usually only a fairly small amount so might not bother you but it's worth bearing in mind. Also, if you get a particularly annoying MOT tester they may refuse to do this.

- They don't have sidelight holes. To get around this you can buy sidelight adaptors. They consist of a metal ring with a basic bulb holder that you squeeze in with the H4 or H4H bulb, then two wires trail out from that. These wires just connect to your sidelight connector. Another option is to have the main beam in the main lamp unit (if it's not already) and use your aux lights as side lights. Again this depends on how lenient your MOT tester is. If you have a UK car you'd need to replace your aux lights with something less bright to use them as sidelights. I used the angel eye lights from dstuning.com for a while.



Having gone from UK lights to aftermarket one-piece lights with angel eye auxes and then to JDM my personal view is that the aftermarket lights have too many shortcomings and are too much hassle. My current plan is to clean up my JDM lights as much as possible, remove the orange indicator lights and maybe splash out on some brighter bulbs at some point.

If do decide to go aftermarket there are several sources for them:
Ebay
http://www.12tune.com
ww.funkypower.com
etc etc

A couple other things..

HID Conversion kits

There's some debate over whether these are legal or not. I'm not sure if they are or not but apparently they are illegal in some US States. The problem is that if you just stick a HID bulb in headlamp that's not designed for it the beam pattern will be all over the place and you'll end up dazzling other drivers. This is pretty dangerous.
If you want HID lights the best solution is to get some clear aftermarket headlights, then retrofit some proper HID projector units (such as the ones in S2000 lights). The projector unit will take care of the focusing/alignment of the beam. This solution is probably the ultimate headlight solution but it doesn't come cheap - you need the aftermarket lights, projector units and all the electrical gubbins that go with it (ballast and stuff?). A few people on DelSolUK have done this conversion and it looks awesome. If you're a paid up member there's a thread in the "Uncensored Chat" forum which has a nice step-by-step thread showing shady's S2000-in-Del-Sol-Lamps HID conversion.
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Hexa-dB
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