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LED Exterior Light Upgrade

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SaxMan

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While I do try to keep Baby Blue relatively stock, I had been mulling upgrading the exterior lights to LEDs to help make the car more visible. Since this car's purpose is to be driven, safety trumps originality for me. Joe Parlanti of Veloce Solutions was looking for a Spridget as a test bed so he could start offering exterior light packages for them, so I offered him Baby Blue as his guinea pig. Joe is a Sunbeam guy, who has a spectacular Tiger. Joe lives nearby, so he stopped by my house and we did the install together.

Here's some pics of the installation:

LED on top for the turn, Dual-type LED for the driving/brake light below
DSC_0046 by David Cohen, on Flickr

Front turn signal. These were probably left on the car during the repaint as they were a pain in the butt to remove. The gaskets were completely dry rotted and gooey. New ones on order!:
DSC_0049 by David Cohen, on Flickr

Even in a picture, you can see this lights are considerably brighter as the amber lenses now look bright yellow:
DSC_0055 by David Cohen, on Flickr

..and much brighter taillights and tag light:
DSC_0056 by David Cohen, on Flickr

The one issue we had was with the hazard lights -- I could not find the hazard flasher at all, and the hazards do not like the new turn signal relay. The only thing I could figure was the hazard flasher is located behind or even in the radio box? Right now, I can live without the hazards, but I do need to replace the flasher with an LED relay.

With all this work on the exterior lighting, the next logical step is to upgrade the headlights. My understanding is that new headlight relays would need to be installed that run directly off the battery. Has anyone done this? Electrical stuff isn't my strong suit...do you need an engineering degree to replace the relay?

If you're interested in reaching out to Joe, you can hit him through his website at: https://velocesolutionsllc.com/ - You can see his Tiger on the home page. If you want to go the LED route, he's definitely the guy to talk to.
 
Looks interesting - thanks for this - headlight relay is easy
 
The pictures look nice.

I was thinking about this. As a marketing tool, how about temporarily re-fitting an incandescent bulb in each right side lamp socket. That would allow potential customers to see side-by-side under the same lighting conditions (preferably dark) the difference in the LEDs and traditional bulbs.
 
JPSmit said:
Looks interesting - thanks for this - headlight relay is easy
Click to expand...

Coming back to this, Advance has a wiring digram https://www.advanceautowire.com/ Look under headlight relay kit. When you buy the relays (which you can get locally) you can buy them with or without harness - buy the harness, it is much much easier. I found piece of wire that was three or four separate wires fused together and, used that to run the wire from the solenoid - just looks neater and makes it into a kind of harness that I can remove at any time. I also put a relay on the horn at the same time.
 
dklawson said:
The pictures look nice.

I was thinking about this. As a marketing tool, how about temporarily re-fitting an incandescent bulb in each right side lamp socket. That would allow potential customers to see side-by-side under the same lighting conditions (preferably dark) the difference in the LEDs and traditional bulbs.
Click to expand...

I realize that not all LED's are the same but I did as Doug suggested with LED on one side and standard on the other. The standard was much brighter mainly, I think, because the LED's don't use the reflectors built into the standard tail lights. Just cleaning up those reflectors and the lens makes a big difference. David's gasket has shrunk like they all do and that lets in grunge. Unfortunately the usual suspects after market gasket wont work. At least the ones I have won't.

I fitted and located headlight relays behind the grill and spiced in at the stock junction of the two headlights into the harness located there. Hot lead right off the back of the alternator gave me the lest amount of wiring, modification, and much brighter headlights. [Halogen]

Kurt.
 
Behind a red lens a super bright red LED would yield good results. A super bright white LED is a bit of a waste since the majority of wavelengths will be filtered out.
 
I did suggest to Joe a left/right comparison, but apparently the LEDs have some interference issues when you leave the incandescent bulbs on the same circuit.

Anyone know where the hazard relay / flasher is located?

Yes, my gaskets are pretty worn. I'm going to try a set from Moss and see what happens. The front gaskets are completely shot, so I have to replace them.

I'm still running a generator -- anything I need to worry about with the headlight harness.
 
Never tried the red LED's so that is another test that needs to be made. Only interference that I could see that would be a problem would be with the changed out flasher. With the generator you will still get brighter headlights with no generator problems. You are mainly just decreasing the resistance in the wiring.

Kurt
 
Short trips at night with heater running. You may find you need to recharge battery occasionally. Be sure and add a fusible link when you connect to solenoid as an alwYs on power source. You can tap into the Blue/ white and Blue/Red pairs for headlight power right where the cone out of the large harness by to cover for pedal box. Be sure you also clean up the ground wire that attaches under the heater duct on inner fender. This is a simple fix that doubles candlepower at night.
 
Trevor Jessie said:
Behind a red lens a super bright red LED would yield good results. A super bright white LED is a bit of a waste since the majority of wavelengths will be filtered out.
Click to expand...

Trevor, on a BE there is no reflector behind the bulb so I imagine the LED's would be a big improvement on them. Is that where you have seen them?

Kurt.
 
There are many LED solutions out there now. I do not know how well https://litezupp.com/ bulbs work, but I like the design.
 
Trevor Jessie said:
There are many LED solutions out there now. I do not know how well https://litezupp.com/ bulbs work, but I like the design.
Click to expand...

I like the idea of a board that pretty much fills the inside of the lens with many LED's on it. Someone is offering something like that for an LBC...don't remember where right now. It should be possible to make something like that up that would use the common bulb base. I'm running red LED's in a licence plate holder that I have wired into my brake circuit. Purchased through "Summit Racing". It should wake up a few texting teen age'rs and cell phone talkers.

Kurt.
 
I'm pretty sure Joe's kit which is taillights, tag light, reverse lights, front turn signals and flasher unit is going to retail around $65.
 
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