Are there any bulbs that are slightly brighter than the standard 55W, but not quite 80W? 65W? 70W?
any narva or osram 55/60 watters will be brighter than any standard bulbs you can buy in a store except for maybe the PIAAs autism zone charges like 60 bucks for. and you can get the osrams for ~$30 shipped IIRC on ebay. or go to www.danielsternlighting.com and order from him.
> I'd like to buy a pair of these bulbs: 70/65W Osram Plus 50:
> *$22/ea* They will be going in Autopal rectangular sealed beam
> conversion housings with an eautoworks.com harness rated for 80/100W.
Autopal headlights are dangerous junk made poorly in India, not safe for even minimal road speeds let alone normal speeds, no matter what bulbs you put in them. And Chinese headlight wiring harnesses such as the one you point to make a bad situation even worse by spoiling the dependability of your headlights. You don't have to buy good headlights or good wiring from me, but you do have to buy good headlights and good wiring, period. I will not sell you bulbs for dangerously bad headlights.
He replied:What is wrong with Autopals? These are the units with the glass fluted lens, not the "crystal" model with the polycarbonate lens.
I also have a pair of IPF e-codes in my other vehicle, and I can't tell any difference in quality between the IPFs and Autopals except the rear bulb seals aren't as thick on the Autopals.
I actually have a suspicion they are made by the same Indian manufacturer that makes the Hella e-codes.
The IPF and Autopal also have equally sharp cutoffs. Here are some photos I took to compare stock wiring to my harness (left and right):
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v468/winkosmosis/lowbeam.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v468/winkosmosis/highbeam.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v468/winkosmosis/oemvseautoworks.jpg
As for the harness, it looks fine. And these are popular among Jeepers. The possible points of failure would be the relays, and I doubt both would fail at once.
-----Original Message-----
From: Consult Daniel Stern Lighting [mailto:[email protected]]
> I'd like to buy a pair of these bulbs: 70/65W Osram Plus 50:
> *$22/ea* They will be going in Autopal rectangular sealed beam
> conversion housings with an eautoworks.com harness rated for 80/100W.
Autopal headlights are dangerous junk made poorly in India, not safe for even minimal road speeds let alone normal speeds, no matter what bulbs you put in them. And Chinese headlight wiring harnesses such as the one you point to make a bad situation even worse by spoiling the dependability of your headlights. You don't have to buy good headlights or good wiring from me, but you do have to buy good headlights and good wiring, period. I will not sell you bulbs for dangerously bad headlights.
> What is wrong with Autopals?
They're poorly made of poor-quality materials, with no real optical engineering behind them. You are trying to judge them by what you think you see in terms of a cutoff, and that's just not a realistic criterion.
The low-beam cutoff is really easy to create. It's what's *under* the cutoff (the light distribution) that makes a safe/adequate or unsafe/inadequate beam pattern. Even amongst reputable-brand lamps made well with good quality materials, there's a huge range of performance.
Take a look at
http://dastern.torque.net/Photometry/isocomparo.html .
These are beam diagrams for four different 7" round H4 headlamp units. Why not photographs? Because photographs of beam patterns are misleading even if the photographer has the best of intentions, because pixels and film work in a fundamentally different way than human eyes. If we're trying to compare headlamps, we need to use an objective representation of different headlamps' beam performance. The way to do that is with isocandela diagrams, which are generated by a machine called a photogoniometer that measures the intensity of light produced by the headlamp through a large range of vertical and horizontal angles. are just like topographical
(elevation) maps, except the squiggles and lines represent amounts of light, instead of elevation above sea level. The beam pattern is correctly aimed as it would be on a car on the road, and each differently-colored line represents the threshold of a particular intensity level. Each diagram is plotted on a chart calibrated in degrees. Straight ahead is represented by (0,0), that is, zero degrees up-down and zero degrees left-right.
To get a mental approximation of the units and amounts under discussion
here:
Parking lamp: About 60 to 100 candela
Front turn signal: About 500 candela
Glaring high-beam daytime running lamps (e.g. Saturn): 8000 candela
The parameters to pay attention to are the luminous flux (total amount of light within the beam), the maximum intensity and its location within the beam relative to the axial point (H,V) -- the less downward/rightward offset, the longer the seeing distance -- stray light outside the beam pattern and effective beam width (contained within the dark-turquoise 500 candela contour)
Headlamps are presented starting with the best-performing one: Marchal H4, Cibie Z-beam, Cibie E-code, Hella E-code.
I'm not sure where your idea came from that Hella lights are made in India. They're actually made in Germany. The Autopal units are a cheap knockoff of the Hellas, with about as much success as could be expected if you gave someone your eyeglasses and they made a plaster mould of them and then purported to make you a new set of eyeglasses from the plaster mould.
You're making the same error attempting to judge the harness by what you think it looks like.
Sorry, but quality parts are quality parts, dangerous junk is dangerous junk, and that's just the way it is. I'm not trying to upsell you here
-- I'll be glad to refer you to other vendors, and advise you which headlamps to seek and which ones to avoid at any given price range -- but I will _NOT_ help you endanger yourself or others with bad lighting.
Period. And that will remain the case no matter how many ignorant opinions you find on the internet.
(IPFs aren't much of any good, either.)
DS
LOL wow. I've only ordered from him once and I simply said "hey I need these bulbs" and that was that.
He seems to know his junk though. Sorry to throw you into the lion's den :laugh: Personally, I'm not a fan of the autopals, but they do the job. I have two cars with the EA harness and it works- wires are wires so long as the connections are solid as someone else posted before. If my XJ was still my DD I'd throw the Cibie housing in it and a set of Osrams.
Heh, I figured he'd want information about where the bulbs are going. I ordered the 70/65 bulbs from that store I posted.