Cascade Crew

[Al Hasse]

After going back and forth about which lighting system to upgrade to, I made my decision and purchased a new set last week and received them today. I have a set of cheap H4 lights on my 92, the beam is OK, but still throws light all over the place. The 89, which I bought these for still has the inadequate sealed beams and later on, the 92 will also have a set of these. HID projector retrofits looked like too much work, and I don't really care for the round projector in the square housing.

The easiest thing to do was to follow Chelsea's lead and go with a set of H4 and H1 housings from Daniel Stern, along with a relay wiring kit to upgrade the harness accordingly. I'll post beam patterns for all three (sealed beam, Pilot H4 and my new H4) tonight after dark.

What I ended up with are Bosch housings (Cibie doesn't make the 165mm housing any more), which fit perfectly into the headlight buckets without any modifications. A pair of 70/65W H4 bulbs and a pair of 100W H1 bulbs. I also ended up paying almost twice as much as Chelsea since I have two more housings and two more bulbs.

[Al Hasse]

Now the light patterns, pics are taken about 10 feet away from the garage door. All just the low beam setting to show the cutoff, if any.

This is from the Lo/Hi sealed beam, the pattern actually isn't all that bad, just doesn't project as far as you would need it...



Pilot H4, from my 92. I was actually surprised at the lack of a cutoff, but there is more light down low in front of the car...



Bosch H4 E-Code. Nice sharp cutoff and slight angle up on the right side. Also plenty down low in front of the car.

[iansane]

Looks good. That's a hell of a cutoff!

[jchaussee]

What is this bosche set up that you speak of?

[Al Hasse]

www.danielsternlighting.com

There may be other places where you can get these, but here you can only order via e-mail after some consulting from Daniel Stern. He has a wealth of information on the site.

[Alphius]

I did a 165mm E-code conversion on my friend's Ford Probe a few years back. We got all the lighting stuff from Susquehanna Motorsports at http://www.rallylights.com/. We also did a relay harness at the same time. It was sweet. They throw so much more light right where it is useful. I ditched the stock plastic headlights on my Subaru and went with the glass E-code headlights from Europe and the cutoff is amazing just like that as well. I want to do the Camaro but it is a pretty expensive little project for 4 headlights. Maybe I'll start with the two lows and do the highs later.

[Al Hasse]

Lights are in, wired up and almost ready to go. I need to "borrow" a flat spot on my brother-in-law's driveway and properly aim them, and also to securely mount the relays. Can't wait to see what they do on the road...

[Albertallen]

[Al Hasse]

I've researched LED headlights some time ago. Personally, I don't care for the looks of them, same reason I didn't do an HID retrofit into the housing. I'm sure they've improved a bit in light output since I was looking, but the best LED light I've seen doesn't have the lumen output that my E-Code lights do. A 60/55 watt H4 light outputs 1000 lumens on low beam compared to 750 lumens for the LED light. The same H4 bulb on high beam outputs 1650 lumens compared to 850 lumens for the LED light.


These ratings are for the best I've found. I'm sure that there may be some better out there, but for the price, and fit, I like my E-Code lights.

[iansane]

I just realized those are the same exact bulbs I ran in my h4 conversions before I went HID. They're awesome!