But why are the lights so dim?

[torchard]

I know this is a loaded question, in that many factors could contribute to the problem, but assuming the wiring is sound and all contacts are clean etc, why are the low beams so low? Shouldn't these 55w H3s be sufficient? What did they use in Japan? Are the DRL units reducing the voltage to the lights? It seems odd to me that so many of these seem to be suffering from dim low beams. Thoughts?

PS I've seen more than one person complain of limited improvements by installing PIAAs and the like (I've got a set of $60+ bulbs on the counter and am hesitant to install them if I'm gonna be disappointed).

--T

[Schwa]

The bulbs that come in the new LHD pods are sub-standard, and I guess a lot of people don't replace them. My low beams aren't too dim but I wouldn't mind if they were a little brighter. A good test to see if it's the wiring or the bulb at fault would be to test the voltage drop to the lights, then you'll know how bad the wiring really is.

[marsgal42]

My low beams are actually acceptable. I guess I lucked out.

My high beams are bright.

...laura

[coaxial]

Do you have the 4 square lights or are your low beams the crazy marble looking lens thing?

I hated how dim the low beams were (I have the crazy marble looking lens lowbeams) so I spent I think $80 on PIAA's brightest H3 bulbs. They got a little brighter and are white instead of orange but no real improvement. So I picked up $30 square driving lights from canadian tire and mounted them on the underside of the brush guard (right under MITSUBISHI), ran the wire along a beam and up through the grommet by the fuse box and put a switch inside. I am happy now, my only advice is to get the $50 driving lights not the $30 ones, the plastic mounting bits are crap on the $30 ones, I am waiting for them to fall of any day now. The "BAJA" ones are probably even better.
P.S. if you mount them upside down as I did you have to flip the lens and reflector over as well.

I'm using:
Halogen Compact Black Lamp Set
Product #20-3591-6
Powerful 55W halogen bulb with optical quality glass lens
$29.99

[TardisDeli]

Have you checked the alignment (maybe wrong word) of the lights. Park 25 feet away from a wall, on flat ground so Deli is level. Low beam should hit the wall about 5cm lower than the exact height of the centre of the bulb (bring your tape measure). When we drive down a dark side street at night, we can see that it isnt lighting ahead of us, but rather down to ground. We did the expensive bulb route (Piaa , forget which but I can go look if you want) and now I am happy driving at night. Cheers, Christine of the Tardis Deli.

[EnviroImports.com]

actually a very comon problem ive had to fix on many peoples vans is their drl is wired in wrong so its gounding half the current and your low beams are only getting partial voltage. its a very complicated system the drl is, its a whole three wires, and they are even labled, but people even some mechanics manage to screw it up. but maybe look at your drl module see if its wired up properly, also the "comon" e-code lights come with crap for bulbs and they either burn out in a few days or fade fast, the ones we bought are good for a min of 12 months, so there ARE options out there for what you get. but even if you have the odd fitting old style lights , check the wiring on them alot of them dont cover the end of the positive feed at the bulb so they bounce around a bit, and then they ground out, but you can fix that if your a bit mechanical.
Noel

[delicat]

"check the wiring on them alot of them dont cover the end of the positive feed at the bulb so they bounce around a bit, and then they ground out..."

Not sure if I follow you? Headlights wires or DRL or what? Maybe 'cause I'm no mechanic by trade or 'cause I'm no English by birth... I have my headlights ready to be installed (did solder the new connections in), something else I should do?

Thanks.

[EnviroImports.com]

I guess Im saying it could be a few things, could be a badly wired drl, could be a bad drl, or could be the faulty wiring that is comon with one brand of delica lights.

[torchard]

Exactly - a few factors possibly. I put in some PIAA bulbs since my post and don't notice a significant improvement, but I'll get the lights properly aligned, as I think that's an issue. At some point I'll check the voltage at the bulbs to see if there's any congestion. The DRL was installed by a reputable fella and a general look when I was replacing the bulbs didn't reveal any flaky wiring, but I'll take a closer look.

Thanks.

--T

[EnviroImports.com]

check if your drl is grounded, alot of people think that one of the three wires are suposed to be a ground, well if you run the grote drl then its NOT suposed to be grounded, well not in the way that most people think of a ground. for other drl's I cant coment on what im not using.....

[torchard]

check if your drl is grounded, alot of people think that one of the three wires are suposed to be a ground, well if you run the grote drl then its NOT suposed to be grounded, well not in the way that most people think of a ground. for other drl's I cant coment on what im not using.....

Thanks - and would this result in lower voltage at the bulb?

--T

[EnviroImports.com]

Hi, well I will do the best I can to describe/explain with out actually having the drl in front of me, the headlight has three wires into it and a fourth if you have my new versions for the actual drl.

the drl has three wires coming out of the box.
One wire I believe the pink wire with the fuse on it, goes to Switched power, NOT CONSTANT power, for some reason many mechanics and regular people put this to constant power after seeing a fuse. DONT DO IT.
even in the paperwork that comes with it, it says Switched power, something that will have power ONLY when you turn the key to on.
now there are two wires left, I believe its Blue and ....yellow? well one of those goes to the Low beam of the wiring harness on the back of a traditional headlight OR the DRL specific bulb , so that when the vehicle is turned on the headlight will get 6v of power to light up the low beam or the drl bulb. following? ok good.
Now the other wire and the only wire left actually ties into the headlight switch wire OR another wire that will give voltage when the headlights are turned on, so this will recieve a tiny bit of voltage and turn OFF the drl module so when the headlights come on the drl turns off, and thats the key as the LAW says the drl MUST disengage when the headlights come on.

SO when some one sees the pink wires fuse and goes to constant power the drl has constant power even when the key is off so your lights will stay on ALL THE TIME lol, and it has happined MANY times where even journeyman mechanics will wire up the pink, and line to the headlight and having thrown out the instructions becase they are mechanical gods and know everything, they will wire up that last one as a ground thinking everything electircal must have a ground wire. ....... see where im going with this?
So it has happines where people just start touching wires to see what happines that the headlights are turned on and since one of the drls wires are GROUNDED and electical current likes the path of least resistance your headlights only have about HALF the voltage so you get really dim lights and you burn out your drl .

Other sources for dim lights are Crappy bulbs. no you dont need to spend big dollars to get the sun coming out your headlights , becuase if you have gound most of your volts you wont get much light anyway and you will just burn out your bulb as they are trying to do their job and use 12 volts of power and only getting unstable volts that are trying to ground & light up the bulb.

I hope that helps with anyone strugling to sort out some wiring issues. Here is a whopper I will throw out at you all. Who out there thinks that in your 12 volt car the electicity comes out your Positive terminal? and back into your ground? will it shock you to know that it actually works in reverse? and thats why anytime your working on your vehicle your told to disconect the GROUND, and no need to disconect the positive. Yupper, one of the may things I learned along the way , well that and my brother is an electrician....

ttyl
Noel

[EricN]

Electron (- to + which is proven to be true) and conventional theory (+ to - which is how any automotive wire schematic is written) have nothing to do with disconnecting the ground first.
You are told to disconnect the ground first because ground is to the chassis. If you use a wrench on the ground terminal and touch the wrench to anything else while you are working nothing will happen. Touch the wrench to something else when you are working on the positive and you made a welder.

[JMK]

I'm wondering if maybe the actual solution here is grossly overlooked. I made a related post regarding the factory wire guage, which is capable of handling 44 Watts, and there were not many responses to it. So a driver purchases some nice new PIAA or Silverstar bulbs and is disappointed by the results. Well, the problem may be that your wires are simply not supplying enough current to the bulbs, and that is why they are dim.

A very knowledgable mechanic in Calgary told me the single biggest improvement anyone can make to a Halogen bulb system short of an HID conversion, is to give it all the current it can use. He said that if you do that a $4.00 halogen H1 or H3 bulb will outshine a Silverstar bulb in an unconverted system. He recommended that to do it, you use 12 guage wire and run it to your headlights directly from a source that is capable of supplying high current such as alternator or battery. Use a relay to activate it from your headlight switch.

I've seen numerous comments about how bad the lights are, and how even using high end bulbs disappoints. I can only speculate that in 1992 the tungsten bulbs of the time did not demand the high current present day bulbs do. It makes sense that if you want to take advantage of 2007 technology, you may want to upgrade your OEM wiring harness to match the demands of present day bulbs. I think that changing your wiring is probably the solution that is required if you want your Deli's lights to shine brightly. I also have a 1991 Toyota Land Cruiser HDJ81 from Japan sitting here, and it has the same problem in regards to the lights.

While we're on this topic I have a question for Noel:

One year guarantee on the headlight bulbs and this new series of Delica headlights has an aditional light built in for the day time running lights so you dont wear out your normal headlight bulbs.

Noel, this 'additional light', are you referring to the "city light"*? (The reason I ask is I just installed some eCode headlights and they had a 'city light' socket in them.) The 'city light' socket in my case resided in the high beam cavity and appears to normally uses a 5 watt bulb, which is probably not sufficient as a daytime running light.

And a confession for Noel: When I did my Land Cruiser, I hooked my DRL to a constant source first to test it. The results were not pretty. Thanks for pointing out the difference between that and a 'switched source' because this knowledge belongs to the 'been there, done it' crowd.

*A note about "city lights" that I plagerised from another site: The city lights are the small bulbs that are mounted in the main reflector near the low beam bulbs on European code headlights. They serve as parking lights in Europe and are not needed in North America, however many people wish to use them. They would connect to the parking light "hot" wire and ground. On cars where the city light is accessible and the wire does NOT go through the headlight plug (such as Mk2 VW's), no city light wiring is included in the kits. On cars where the headlights are sealed assemblies and the and all the wires go through a harness plug, city light connections are included.

Another note: The Grote DRL module, probably like many others, which is sold in Can Tire, does supply a reduced voltage to the low beam when it senses the ignition is on. That's why it's preferable to use a DRL module rather than a standard relay to create your DRL's.

[torchard]

Yes, I recall your earlier posts and had similar thoughts. It's a set of pretty darn skinny edit: wires at the connectors. I recall the same fix for early broncos and the like i.e. heavier gauge from battery to relay to lights. As I said earlier I will poke around with a multi meter and see what kind of voltage/amperage actually gets to the bulb sockets. Adding a relay, etc. might be complicated a wee bit by the DRL unit. I might be inclined to go with some aux. driving lights (with relay and fuse) and leave the stock wiring harness as is.

...Although the truth is there are so many jobs --and most of them are not related to this van (we've got another kid coming in two weeks)-- that many of these projects don't get off the drawing board!

PS I spoke to Glen at CCA about this and he feels the flat cut off pattern is also a contibuting factor. Rather than a big circular splash of light like we're used to, the Euro style is to cut off the top very flat. Therefore if your lights are pointed too low to begin with, then this sharp cut off will have a significant impact.

Cheers,

--Todd