BART got new eyes yesterday

Big5er · July 10, 2019

I installed new Depo brand headlights and driving lights yesterday. The new ones went in easy enough but getting the old ones out was a pain in the butt. They all use several metal "nuts" held by the plastic housing and plain old bolts. After 18 years the rust sort of takes over. The hardest one was the drivers side fog light. I literally cut the plastic housing from the front so I could access the "nuts" and hold them with a pair of vice grips in order to remove the bolts. I put in all new bolts and used some anti-seize on them. I'm gonna keep an eye on them for a while to make sure the anti-seize doesn't let the bolts loosen up.
The new lights came with all the bulbs installed but I am tempted to see what a set of LED headlights would look like. Anyone tried them??

GlennWest · July 10, 2019

Have LED in mine. Huge inprovement.

Brad & Jacolyn · July 10, 2019

You only need headlights if you drive after dark Phil. You are supposed to be in the camp site long before that.

Brad

geodog · July 10, 2019

Some people just have to spend their retirement money.

ShortyO

Cotreker · July 10, 2019

Will you please share where you purchased your replacement housings from and cost. My polish job made improvements but new ones are needed. Brad I have to drive at night after playing hard during the day.

On the fog lights do you have lamps in both positions? I only have lamps in one.

Thanks,

Dennis

Big5er · July 10, 2019

5 hours ago, Brad & Jacolyn said:

You only need headlights if you drive after dark Phil. You are supposed to be in the camp site long before that.

Brad

I know that Brad...but sometimes I need to get an early start to get outta town before they notice I'm gone.

5 hours ago, geodog said:

Some people just have to spend their retirement money.

ShortyO

Hey, they actually are paying me more to stay home than they were paying me to go to work. I gotta do something with the extra money

1 hour ago, Cotreker said:

Will you please share where you purchased your replacement housings from and cost. My polish job made improvements but new ones are needed. Brad I have to drive at night after playing hard during the day.

On the fog lights do you have lamps in both positions? I only have lamps in one.

Thanks,

Dennis

Dennis, yes, I have the lights in both positions in the fog/driving lights. I got all 4 lights (headlights and fog lights) on Amazon as a "set". It came with ALL the bulbs for the set. I got the set for $409. HERE is the listing.

Jack Mayer · July 10, 2019

I've also used those lights like Phil got....they work well and are good quality for the $$$. They are not near as good as LED though.

Cotreker · July 11, 2019

Thanks! - Looks like a real good deal; later I can add LED.

chief916 · July 11, 2019

I don't have those lights cause my truck is to old....1997 Volvo but just about every exterior light is led. I found some led head lights that popped right in for something like I wanna say 30 or 40 bucks.... can't remember but they had little cooling motors on them. They are really bright. No one has flashed me to dim my lites. I was concerned that they might be to bright to on coming traffic but it seems not. But I really like the looks of those new ones you installed.

ARGO · July 11, 2019

Well, the project is not complete yet, but I installed Gen 2 lights into a Gen 1 housing, replaced the lens with clear Lucite. Damaged lights from my salvage yard were cheap. Pics to follow or PM me.

Nuke-E · July 18, 2019

On 7/10/2019 at 8:58 AM, Big5er said:

I installed new Depo brand headlights and driving lights yesterday. The new ones went in easy enough but getting the old ones out was a pain in the butt. They all use several metal "nuts" held by the plastic housing and plain old bolts. After 18 years the rust sort of takes over. The hardest one was the drivers side fog light. I literally cut the plastic housing from the front so I could access the "nuts" and hold them with a pair of vice grips in order to remove the bolts. I put in all new bolts and used some anti-seize on them. I'm gonna keep an eye on them for a while to make sure the anti-seize doesn't let the bolts loosen up.
The new lights came with all the bulbs installed but I am tempted to see what a set of LED headlights would look like. Anyone tried them??

The fog light mounting bolts can definitely be a pain, but I would have thought you were far enough south to avoid the corrosion from salt spray. Or did you get your truck from GATS in Minnesota? When I first started dealing with this stuff, a few of the Canadians enlightened me to the idea that corrosion tends to be worse on the driver's side of these trucks--they spend a lot of time either in the right lane or on 2-lane roads, and passing traffic is almost always to their left.

For some reason, when I got my rig, the computer was programmed to have fog lights, but they weren't installed. I bought new lights, but they didn't come with bolts. In addition to being a pain to get off, if you use too long of a bolt or get it crossthreaded just a bit, those same nuts break loose on the new housing. Don't ask how I know.

You shouldn't have any trouble with anti-seize on the bolts, as long as you got the housings in the right spot before snugging them up.

As far as the LED "bulbs", it's a loaded question. First of all, quality is all over the map, even within a particular brand (most "brands", of course, don't actually identify a manufacturer). Part of that results from the fact that they're illegal to sell in the US, having a bulb base for a regulated bulb type, but not matching the other specifications for the type. It's the wild west if there's a problem, and the list of companies selling on Amazon or other outlets today is very different each year, and the brand shown is getting some NHTSA scrutiny on this issue--it might still be a year away, but you'll probably see their name in the Federal Register before too long.

But set the legal stuff aside for a minute. In general, these LEDs in a projector assembly tend to give you a lot more light over a broader area. The problem with the typical distribution that results is that puts most of the light in the immediate foreground (i.e. on the ground in front of the truck and in the trees above the truck) relative to the amount of light shining straight ahead. So your (young and newly retired, right?) pupils don't dilate as much, and your ability to discern objects in the distance is actually reduced, even if the cast light off in the distance stayed the same or improved slightly. The effect is similar to trying to drive at night with a bright laptop screen or a dome light on. Your headlights don't get dimmer, but your ability to see is degraded.

In terms of the lights themselves, an LED dissipates its power in the form of heat and light over a very small area. It's what makes them an attractive and efficient technology, and lets us jam 500,000 gigalumens into a tactical flashlight. But the chips themselves have temperature limits, much lower than in glass bulb types, and most of the design work on these things goes into keeping the chip cool enough that it doesn't fail. The ones with active cooling (i.e. fans) tend to be the most problematic, but even ones with passive cooling can conduct enough heat to cause damage to the headlight.

If the proposed application were one where the bulb holder was made of a glass-filled material like the back of a lot of older headlights (92-93 F-series trucks would be a good example), there would be less risk of damage. But the projectors in the Depo lights, just like the originals, are plastic. The heat around the bulb base trying to make its way to the heatsink will cause the reflective surface on the projector to start to degrade, and once that starts the temperatures get hotter, accelerating the degradation. The end result can be this:

https://deepspacelighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/image1-1.jpg

Big5er · July 19, 2019

5 hours ago, Nuke-E said:

The heat around the bulb base trying to make its way to the heatsink will cause the reflective surface on the projector to start to degrade, and once that starts the temperatures get hotter, accelerating the degradation.

So to shorten your post, you are saying the LED's are a no go?

Nuke-E · July 19, 2019

10 hours ago, Big5er said:

So to shorten your post, you are saying the LED's are a no go?

Yeah, the chance of ruining brand new housings would probably have me steering clear for that reason alone. The picture I linked was a customer that was initially pretty happy with them, until the bulbs basically fell out. We both know that you're not likely to get caught for using them (extremely low odds of being stopped, longer odds of any sort of inspection, and virtually impossible odds of someone going to the trouble of looking inside headlights). Even among pro truckers, there are guys that get ticketed for having LED bulbs, but the odds of getting caught are still really low.