Anyone done these in their Dakota? I've been gutting and rewelding my rear quarters and wheel wells in my Cherokee so my Dakota has been playing daily driver duty for the last week and I'm sick garbage stock headlights.

In my Cherokee I've got H4 housings with bulbs and Putco harness which has been a massive improvement over the similarly ****ty stock headlights. When I ordered them originally I ordered the wrong size housings but they're the same size as my Dakota's headlights. I had extra bulbs laying around so I figured **** it, for $25 I'll just order another harness and throw them in the truck. Just curious if anyone else has done a similar swap. If not or if people want I'll try to take pictures when I install everything. It's all plug and play and pretty straight forward anyway.

 

Ya sure, we would appreciate you taking the your time and showing up some pic's of the installation. Though just curious what face does your Dakota have? The original square front end from the 1987-1990 or the roundish front end from 91-96?

 

Ok I threw everything in but I didn't have time to take pictures of everything because I did it on my lunch break. Either way it's extremely straight forward and the pictures I took afterwards should give you a pretty clear idea of what's going on.

Basically your headlights don't get enough power due to the stock wiring being too thin and not delivering enough power. What the harness does it run power directly from your battery through two relays through thicker wiring to deliver more power to the headlights. Even just the wiring loom without the H4 bulbs and housings is a significant difference in visibility with the stock sealed beams. So it plugs in to the stock headlight socket on the battery side so that your stock headlight controls still function normally but routes power through the supplemental harness rather than the factory wiring. The harness is only $25 but they work great other than the relays which do have a tendency to go out. But, every parts store stocks them and they take two seconds to swap out and they're easy to find in pick and pull yards off late 90s/early 2000s Hondas.

The H4 housings work exactly the same as your stock sealed beams only they take H4 bulbs. Install is the same as your normal sealed beams. I've only got leftover 55w bulbs in right now but I'm going to order some Hella 80/100w bulbs tomorrow when I get paid. I'll take pics tonight when it gets dark of them turned on.





Relays I just laid right up on the battery tray but they do come with mounting hardware if you want to mount them elsewhere.



Routing the wiring from side to side is actually easier than it was on my Jeep. I just layed it up on top the radiator and tucked it between. It's nice and snug and shouldn't go anywhere.



Only problem I ran into is the plug that plugs into our stock plug for the headlights (drivers side only, passenger side just isn't used anymore) isn't the same layout as our sealed beams. There's little tabs on the wiring pins holding it in the connect. I just pushed them in with a pocket screwdriver and ditched the connector and pushed the pins into the socket individually.





I'll post pics up of them flipped on once it gets dark outside but they should be a significant upgrade. Even with the difference in the layout of the one connector I had these thrown in in all of 20 minutes.

Here's links to the 3 parts on Amazon. Under $100 shipped. Easily the best drivability upgrade I've done on my Jeep and I'd do it on any XJ I buy in the future.

Harness - $25

Bulbs - $14 (I'm going to be ordering these again, the ones in the pics are only 55w)

Housings - $37

Total - $76 plus $5 or so shipping

 

I wish I'd gotten before pics but you all know how crappy the stock headlights are. These are from my parking lot and there's an overhead light drowning some of the light out but it's still pretty telling. They're at least twice as bright.

Low beams



High beams