Headlights

[Ben824]

HIDs in halogens housings are not DOT approved therefore making them illegal. While many cops won't pull you over, some states are cracking down on these plug and play setups as they are overly powerful and blind oncoming drivers. Other states that do vehicle inspections will fail cars with drop in plug and play HID kits.

HID Projector retrofits, while not officially DOT approved, meet DOT specs and properly focus HID lighting to get maximum output safely.

The best bang for you buck is the upgraded harness and either sealed beam Syvania Silverstars or a decent set of H4 housings (not the cheap ebay fake projectors) and some H4 Silverstar bulbs.

Middle of the road price upgrade but requires a lot of work is the HID Projector retrofit. I went this route and love it. I got all my parts except the housings from TheRetrofitSource.com

The top dollar, great output, no mess, plug and play upgrade is the LED headlights.

 

[98xjcherokee]

Something to think about thanks for the info Ben.

 

[sandyeggoxj]

I'm happy to hear that ben. I can't stand those retards who put bright blue hid lights in thinking they are better while running crappy projectors.

 

[Ben824]

I'm glad I could provide some helpful information. I came close to putting in a garbage plug and play kit myself but then did more research and found out how bad they are. I also started seeing more and more on the road that looked terrible and blinded me. I didn't want to do that to someone else.

Here is how mine turned out. I LOVE them! I added the angel eye halo rings too. They might be out of place on a Jeep but I think they are cool as hell so I went with them too haha

 

[sandyeggoxj]

Ben, do you have any pictures of them lit up?

 

[mnoeltne]

<snip>
The top dollar, great output, no mess, plug and play upgrade is the LED headlights.

This. I went with the Truck-Lite LED bulbs and I love them. See this thread. for details.

No wiring harness upgrades since the Truck Lite LED bulbs will give full light at anything over 9v. Plus good quality LEDs will outlast multiple halogen bulbs. So, I added up the cost of a good Hella or IPF housings, the wiring harness, and decent H4 halogen bulbs, plus the cost of a couple of extra bulbs since they will burn out sometime, and the LED lights really don't look that expensive anymore.

 

[Ben824]

Ben, do you have any pictures of them lit up?

This is all I have so far but I will see if I can't snap a few more tonight when it is dark.

Amazing Cut-off!

Picture looks good but it doesn't do enough justice to what it looks like in person!

Yes these bulbs are actually slightly different in color. While they are supposed to be the same temperature, they are made by two different manufacturers. The driver side is Morimoto while the passenger is another brand. I had an issue with the driver side bulb so I bought a set of Morimotos to replace them but the passenger side is a little more difficult to access since the battery blocks access to back side of the Projector. Laziness has kept me from replacing it at this point haha I will say it doesn't look as bad in person.

 

[sandyeggoxj]

Those looks nice. Thanks for the pictures. Can you out drive those offroad? With my harness upgrade and 110w h4's I am on the fine line of outdriving my lights. Gets a little sketchy.

 

[Ben824]

Those looks nice. Thanks for the pictures. Can you out drive those offroad? With my harness upgrade and 110w h4's I am on the fine line of outdriving my lights. Gets a little sketchy.

Certainly can drive offroad with them. The connectors for the angel eyes are not weather-proof but some dielectric grease helped with that. You can outdrive these but if you aligned them to DOT spec then you should be fine.

 

[IslanderOffRoad]

Got my harness yesterday

That's some seriously bad "engrish" on the packaging

 

[cruiser54]

Got my harness yesterday

That's some seriously bad "engrish" on the packaging

Written by Wunhung Lo no doubt.

 

[accusedslacker]

I did on mine and a buddies rig Eautoworks harnesses with autopal E-code H4 housings.

Its been roughly a year and a half and they work great on both rigs still..

I second that. The difference was night and day.....so to speak.

 

[IslanderOffRoad]

Got mine done over the weekend. Had planned to use it with stock headlights for now, but dropped one taking it out. So I got a set of silver stars.

I work at 3:30am and drove in today with the lights and harness installed. Wow! Amazing difference! Almost brighter than my 11 wrx.

Piece of cake install too. Now I just need to figure out how to make the fog lights work again

 

[cruiser54]

Got mine done over the weekend. Had planned to use it with stock headlights for now, but dropped one taking it out. So I got a set of silver stars.

I work at 3:30am and drove in today with the lights and harness installed. Wow! Amazing difference! Almost brighter than my 11 wrx.

Piece of cake install too. Now I just need to figure out how to make the fog lights work again

Courtesy of EZEARL
　
　
　
Suppose to be the fix:
If you have stock fog lights on a 97+ and upgrade your harness in a manner that uses the factory wiring to trigger some new relays, your fog lights will have and/or cause issues unless you make some additional modifications to address the problem. It doesn't matter if you use a plug and play harness like the eautoworks or if you split your harness open and completely strip out all the extra factory wiring like I did. The factory fog circuit will cause your new lighting system to not work properly.

If you do nothing, your headlights will work as mentioned above. Low beams will be fine, but after you turn on your high beams, they will not turn off again until you completely turn off your headlights. Big issue here is that when you switch back to low beams, both the high beam and low beam filament will be remain powered causing your bulbs to endure 115W worth of heat output instead of the 55W or 60W that they are designed for. From what I've read this can cause them to overheat and burn out within minutes.

So what is happening? If you look at the driver's side headlight plug (and you have factory fogs) you will notice there are two red wires coming out of one of the terminals. One is a small 18g Red wire which sadly is the stock high beam wire. The other is an even smaller 20g Red wire which ties into Fog Lamp Relay #1 in the PDC. Please keep in mind that Fog Lamp Relay #1 is NOT used to provide battery power to the fog lights the way we commonly use them with aftermarket lighting. It is located before the switch and simply cuts power to the Fog Light Switch unless the Headlight Switch and Beam Selector Switch are in the proper positions. It does this as law dictates that you can't run your high beams and fogs at the same time. Though not a problem here in CA, I've read that states with safety inspection programs will fail your vehicle if the lights don't operate this way.

I dug into the wiring diagrams but had to have kastein help me decipher them because there was something about this circuit that just wasn't making much sense to me. I still don't understand the function of Fog Lamp Relay #1 in its entirety, but we're only concerned with the part that is affected by the headlight harness anyways. Essentially, when your Headlight Switch is off, the relay coil receives no power and therefore won't allow your fog lights to come on. When your Headlight Switch is turned on, one side of the relay's coil receives 12V which causes the relay to activate and send power through to your Fog Light Switch. When you turn your high beams on, 12V is sent out to your headlight socket via the Beam Selector Switch, and then is sent back to the other side of the relay coil via the skinny Red wire on that shared terminal. This brings both sides of the relay coil to 12V, thus causing it to deactivate and turn off the Fog Light Switch. Weird huh? The factory designed it so that the relay is off with both sides at 0V, on with one side at 12V, and then off again with both sides at 12V. While it makes perfect sense now, this is the part that was confusing me.

So what's the problem then? Well, it turns out that even when the high beams are off, there is still approximately 5V on that skinny Red trigger wire for some reason which I still don't understand. While this is obviously not a problem in the factory configuration, it becomes a problem when you are using the high beam wire (which is directly tied into the skinny Red wire) to trigger your aftermarket high beam relay. A typical automotive relay requires approximately 8V to activate and needs to drop to somewhere below 1-5V to deactivate. When you first turn on your lights there is no problem because the phantom 5V is not enough to activate your new high beam relay. When you turn your high beams on, your new relay gets 12V and kicks on. When you go to turn off your high beams, the phantom 5V keeps the new relay from deactivating and voilà, your high beams are stuck on...

So how do we fix this? There are a few common suggestions that are out there that I just wasn't happy with, and a few that sort of work, but not as required by law:

1. Don't use your high beams, new lights are bright enough anyways (OK...)
2. If you have to use your high beams, turn your headlights off briefly to get them turn off (PITA)
3. Pull various fuses (lose your fog lights)
4. Pull the fog lamp relay (again, lose your fog lights)
5. Modify the fog lamp relay (fog lights work, but won't cut out when your high beams are on?)
6. Install a jumper in place of the fog light relay (fog lights work, but switch is always hot?)

One post I saw got it right though. lilredxj99 mentioned it in another thread which I didn't find until after the fact. The details were a little fuzzy and I still thought the issue deserved some further explanation so that's why I just wrote this damn novel...

Oh yeah, so the right way to do it... Cut the 20g Red Fog Lamp Relay #1 ground/trigger wire at the back of the driver's side headlight plug. Extend this wire using your preferred method so that it is long enough to reach your new aftermarket high beam relay. Splice it into the 87 pin (output) of your new high beam relay. If you have two 87's (which is ideal), either one is OK. Do not however use 87a if your relay has it!

Yep, that's it... Your high beams will now turn off when they're supposed to, your fog lights will turn on/off when they're supposed to, and your low beams will continue to work as they're supposed to. Sure you could have skipped all the way down to the bottom and found your answer, but you wanted to know how/why it works, right?

 

[IslanderOffRoad]

I read that already, but my new harness isn't labeled like some others apparently were. How do I know which one is the high beam?

 

[G2WANIT]

Use a test light?

Check the pins on the back of the headlight with headlights on, high beam off. Then with high beams on. the Pin that did not light up the test light with the high beam off but does with high beam on is it... and the wire coming out of it is the high beam wire.

That's what I would do anyway.

 

[IslanderOffRoad]

good plan. i didnt even think of doing it the simple way

 

[scoobyxj]

Factory Foglights and an upgraded headlight harness. Your issues is how the factory designed the system. The fog relays coil is grounded through the drivers side high beam lamp filament. (This is also why that when the drivers side high beam burns out you loose your fog lamps) How it works is when the lights are off you have no voltage to the high beam and you basically have continuity to ground through the lamp filament. When the high beams are on you have voltage on both sides of the relay coil (which causes it to denergize) turning off the fog lamps. The voltage that is on this circuit isn't enough to pull in the harnesses relay, but once you activate the relay it's enough to keep it energized.

The fix....
There are three ways you can do it. The last two being the most legal.
1.. Find and ground the red trigger lead from the fog lamp relay.
This will allow your fog lamps to operate regardless of the high or low beam as long as the parking lamp are on.

2..Again using the red trigger wire from the relay.
Use a additional relay to ground the OEM trigger wire when the high beams are on.
(30 to the trigger wire 87 to ground 86 to ground, and 85 to the red positive wire for the high beams.)

3..Again locating the red trigger wire. Cut it off the OEM headlight plug and connect it to the high beam headlamp +. This will allow the system to work exactly like the OEM system.

FYI.. The fog lamp circuit is set up similer to the head lamps. In where the full current draw of the lamps is pulled through the foglamp switch. Some XJ's have an upgraded relay pack that is connected to the OEM switch releaving the actual switch of the current. However it still travels from the headlamp switch out to the PDC back inside through the switch/relay and back out to the fog lamps. It would be in your best interest to an an harness to the fog lamps as well.


Now you can find the red trigger wire behind the drivers side head light, but the high beam + wire is also red as well. However if you pull out you air cleaner you will find the front lighting harness plug. On the body side of the plug that trigger wire is Brown with a White tracer while the high beam lamp feed continues in red. So if you locate and cut the wire there you can use the front end harness side as your new trigger wire, and ground the body side wire.