It’s been a while since my last post, but there has been too much good driving to be blogging. However, this year marks my CSRs 7th birthday, so I have some updates planned for the car.
So to start off, with all the good weather in CA this February, but the evenings still being dark, it was finally time to upgrade those awful standard headlights!
Blatchat has a good recent article on the latest offerings which can be found here and after Googling about, it turned out that the Wisamic 5.75″ LED lights were available from Amazon for ~$96 and had a coupon offer for 5% off! Since I looked seriously 3 years ago and prices were several hundred dollars each, this seemed like the moment to jump in. I ordered the silver background finish with the LED halo ring, which I planned to use as daytime running lights. Thanks to “Miltec” for the lead to these.
The package arrived as expected in 2 days and so the replacement started.
Before anything else, it is worth reviewing the standard light output:
High Beam
Here is the received package for one of the lights and the visual compare with the standard:
So having removed the headlight, the first job is to remove the sealed beam unit from the chrome bezel. The lamp is held in with W shaped spring clips which can be removed with some pointed nose pliers.
Here’s a rear view of the lights, where you can see the LED unit is shallower and has the same main connector as standard – plug and play:
The new LED units are slightly thicker than standard, so the spring clips need to be modified to fit the new lamp in. A vice and pliers were used to bend them to a flatter shape as shown here:
Ensuring the LED lamps are correctly oriented in the bezel (twin high beam LED lenses at the bottom), the spring clips were re-inserted.
Now to the wiring.
When I built the car, I had added a wire from the side light in the main headlamp to the second filament in the turn signal lamp, so once the sidelight bulb was cut off I started with this – the brown wire was the extra one I added, but could ignore for this fitment, as the sidelight position on the headlamp switch would be used for the DRL halo ring:
A female bullet connector was crimped onto the red wire (sidelight +ve) and the sidelight bulb earth could be ignored. To use the halo ring as DRL requires that the extra wires on the plug need to be separated and the red wire connected to +ve, as shown on their instructions:
The main LED plug was fitted and the bezel screwed back on the headlamp bowl. The first lamp took about 30 minutes to work out, while the other headlamp was done in less than 10 mins. Here’s the new look:
Much more modern looking. And the beam comparison, with no required readjustment of the headlamp pointing position:
You can clearly see the wider spread, as well as general increase in brightness on low beam. And on high beam:
There is a lot more light intensity in the same general beam pattern. All the light photos were taken in daylight.
So the result is halo LEDs turned on in the sidelight, 1st position, of the headlight switch, low beams added at the 2nd position of the switch, then high beams added with the flash or high beam switch.
Light output is significantly different – much brighter – while the broader pattern gave better road visibility closer to the car as well as further away.
An excellent upgrade and great value for money. I hope this helps others make the change in less than 1 hour.
CSR175 