Yes the halogens have distorted my plastic lenses. Agree use LEDs instead.
Agreed Steve. One well-known Healey expert's opinion was that the turn signals / brake lights are on for only a short time, so they wouldn’t generate enough heat to damage the plastic. This is true most of the time, except:
Also, I again wonder about twice the current flow through the thin wire, and the resulting load on the relays. This is where LEDs might have some application, so I ordered a pair of 7 Watt red LEDs with 1156 bases. 1156 bases have only a single contact. The result:
Maybe better seen in the shade:
Turns out the LEDs are at least as bright as the original brake lights with halogen bulbs:
The LEDs and sockets are available from Amazon:
- Jtech 2x 1156 BA15S 7W Cree Q5 LED Pure Red Light Lamp Bulb. Note - Use RED bulbs, not white ones.
- Satco Bayonet Base Single Contact Socket – 802099:
The wires on the socket are color-coded for AC rather than DC, so the white wire goes to the shell. I cut them off short and spliced them so the colors are reversed. That way, the black becomes the ground wire and the white connects to the white/purple or white/brown in the tail lamp. The following photos show how they are installed:
The reflectors easily come apart. I have a BN4 with the cone-shaped reflector.
Using a water-based surfactant (In this case, 409 cleaner) and a 3/4” Forstner bit, I drilled a hole in the middle of the rubber piece. The LEDs are about 0.78” in diameter, so the rubber will hold them.
I then used some 0.025” aluminum and made a holder that hooks behind the rubber flange inside the shroud.
The cutout is like this:
The end on the left is the top, because the shroud is rounded above the reflector. The large circles at the ends are 1 1/4” diameter, although 1 1/8” should work. The thread on the end of the socket is 1/8” pipe thread; the nut is available in the electrical department of your local hardware store.
The reflector is installed in the shroud, the bulb and socket is installed in the holder, the bulb is pushed into the rubber opening and the holder ends hooked between the rubber and backside of the shroud. The wires are connected to the black and white/purple or white/brown wires in the tail light with connectors in between to make removal easier.
If you look carefully at the reflector, there is one side labelled “TOP”. I assume that should be at the top.
Because the load from the incandescent tail light is still there, no change is required to the flasher relay.