Yeah that was a good one. Wonder what else the younger generation will think is "cool"?

 

I always worry how the housing/bulb can handle the heat from having both beams on at one. obviously in the sport setup the dedicated high beam is a lonely element but the low bulb has the high/low function. Genos Garage sells the bright box which also put both beams on at once, and could add fog lights too I believe.

Are you building disconnects or is there something aftermarket? I guess I automatically thought of in cab control but now I consider this could be a manual disconnect setup also

 

You will be blinding people with the highs on constantly. Why bother with stock headlights, Get clear lens housings and a hid projector retrofit. I wanted to do this last year but it didn't happen. Now with the time change it's time to start buying parts.

 

Thanks for the concerns. My understanding of the system follows, someone please clarify if I’m wrong. With the sport headlights there are 4 bulbs, 9004 inners and 9007 outers. Each bulb is a dual filament, but the 9004 low beam is never used. In a stock sport, the low beam is only the 9007 bulb. On high, the inner 9004 and the putter 9007 on high. The harnesses I refer to add power to the 9004 low beam. If you buy a bright box or wire you’re system like a bright box, then it powers both filaments in each bulb, similar to if you put your low beams on and and your stalk back to “flash”’you highs but never released it.

My ultimate plan was to either buy the CE Auto Headlight Harness or build a similar one like the unit made on the 488 Magnum page. To my knowledge these don’t make it so the high and lows are on at the same time, just both bulbs are on for high and low.


Here is the harness I bought off Amazon. Note that it only powers the low 9007 and high 9004. With this harness, I never get all 4 beams powered on.




I will say that for now my plans are on hold and I’m back to the drawing board. For my short term “Jerry rigged” quad low beam and high beam setup I have been hitting road blocks getting the male 9004 connectors and sockets that could handle 12 gauge wiring. My coworker referred me to a friend of his who wires up classic cars on the side. After a couple of texts and a phone call I swung by his shop yesterday and he looked at my plans and pretty quickly talked me out of them.

His biggest concern was using a male 9004 plug and splitting it for 2 headlights. He informed me these generally are for handling low current as a trigger for relays and running full power through it to the bulbs is iffy to him and that putting the load of two bulbs through them at once would be asking for trouble. I put the relay harness in to get rid of the risk of melting wires and I’d be reintroducing the issue. He was none too impressed with the lmc harness as a whole and told me if I plan to keep it, I need to put some fuses in-line at the minimum. If I’m keen on keeping the sport head lights he suggested cutting and splicing the sockets into the lmc harness and removing the adapter plugs entirely. He said I could try wiring it up as quad lights for both low and high but was really leery of the lmc harness’s ability to power all 4 headlights long term. He was also a little curious how much light the 9004 low beam would actually add with the narrow reflector behind it and gave me some suggestions on testing its effectiveness. I will try his ideas out and see if it’s a path I want to continue on.


He told me if I want to ultimately make my own harness he would sell me the parts he suggested at cost and provide any advice he could. While we didn’t price everything out (I showed him the harness made on 488magnum along with the ce auto harness I’ve considered buying) he said everything could be had for less than $100.

My new plan is to test the 9004 bulbs low beam pattern and see what it looks like and how much output it really adds. If I decide it’s the bees knees, then I will work with him to build a a ce auto style harness. If I decide it’s not worth the effort, I will likely just modify the lmc harness with his suggestions to keep things safe while I save up for some HIDs. At the start of the year I have one colleague retiring. About the time we get his replacement hired and up to speed another coworker is off for 2 months of baby bonding. So January through at least June Ill be having some long days but larger paychecks. I’d like to do something for the truck so maybe the HIDs will be the ticket.

 

I'm all for more light output, technology has really advanced unless you're desperate on stock looking housing a nice projector retro fit and some LED bulbs would be as good or better then the quad dual filament theory in my opinion, really at even a stock sport quad setup is pretty deluxe light in my opinion. Maybe im just used to crappy head lights, even my 14 Laramie seems like crap most nights

 

You can put HID bulbs in a reflector housing but will blind oncoming cars. More light yes but not where you want it. You really need a projector to compete to what's on the road today. A halogen bulb is a halogen bulb so don't expect big improvements. You could put 55W low beams in but 45 is the limit "legally". This was a old school cheat to get more light. If you are looking for more/better light and don't want to do projector retrofit a decent LED bulb would probably be the best(low buck) option. Keep in mind the differences between halogen filament bulb and a LED. You need a LED that you can turn to fine tune the beam pattern. I'm not exactly sure how the sport lights work but i think they have dedicated high and low beam bulbs. You can't have both on for low beam. High is a different story. IF the reflector/filament location is the same then you could run two low beams bulbs. I'm sure someone will chime in on the sport lights.

 

I never felt LEDs performed at all in reflector housings, to me you need a projector to get any value from them. I did some several years ago on new clear lense OE single beam style and they were crap light output, lots of light but really went no where. I also had HIDs and like you said dangerously bright for oncoming traffic. I recently put a set of projectors in my 06, I just went with halogen bulbs, maybe should've gone HID or LED but I can always change em later. I both like and hate that the projector low beam has a very nice cutoff line, its nice as you know you're in no way blinding on coming traffic but it also means your light is stopping and that's where its stopping. I feel the light distance quality on projectors is some what compromised but over all they still perform well.

 

Hey everyone. Hope everyone had a good thanksgiving. I appogize in advance I didn’t take any photos of my headlight testing, I’ve been working for 15-30 minutes a night between putting my kids to bed and going to bed myself so I didn’t really document much.

I tested running both bulbs on the driver side by removing most of the relay harness and plugging in the passenger side connector to my driver side 9004 bulb. The results were underwhelming. In the interest of time and putting this to bed for now I decided to just run the lmc harness but add in line fuses for safety. Not sure how I missed the write up on here for the lmc harness but I just followed that procedure.

While reinstalling the harness I began looking at my fog lights I never got to work. I had all the wiring under the hood, but could never find the plug under the dash to plug into the headlight switch. I’m not sure if it’s not there or just tucked away very well but the more I looked the more my dash disintegrated in my hands so I felt it was best to leave enough alone. I saw Amazon had a Black Friday sale for a fog light relay harness that would plug right in to the bulbs. My truck had a mystery switch in the dash already that wasn’t hooked up to anything. So Wednesday night I completed hooking everything up and bam, head lights and fog lights!



The one thing I noticed is the the fog lights were aimed really high. I looked at an alignment procedure and thought, hmmm I never actually aimed my new headlights when I put them in. They looked about even with my old, trashed ones and I’ve never gotten flashed at night when driving so I must be good. Thursday night I marked up one of my fences and oof, my headlights looked something like this:




Well I got my headlights all lined up now and same with the fog lights. Here’s what things look like this morning. I have yet to drive it around at night but hopefully this helps with the headlight output issues when driving.

 

Happy new year everyone, hope everyone had a good Christmas. Just a little update. I took the family up to the snow and our in laws at the start of the year. Truck drove great and even my wife commented the lights seemed brighter on the ride home.



One small hiccup, during the drive my son kept asking me to turn the radio up. After a certain point we jokingly asked “can you not hear it? It’s blasting up front!” He responded no, there’s no sound in the back. Uhoh. After messing around I get no sound from the back driver side speaker. Guess a new set of rear speakers are in order now. A new head has been on my list to get, but it seems like a full sound system might be in order.

 

Hey Folks. I’ve developed a few leaks in my cooling system this summer and it’s time to address them. Does anyone have a radiator they’d recommend? It looks like I’ll be replacing the radiator, thermostat and water pump.