North Australian FISH FINDER TM forums

Thanks to all and I now realize that I omitted a crucial piece of information when describing my situation.....I don't want to spend thousands of dollars on lights. Don't get me wrong, I always buy the best quality I can but have to be able to justify the expense (Gran was a McDougall).

After doing some research, I had ruled out HID as I could not justify the expense against the degree of use (late trips back from the Daly, Shady, SWA etc and a run down South once in a blue moon). I used to do a lot of bushwork in the Pre -HID days and loved the pair of Hella Rallye 2000s on my troopy (which were the largest Hella made at the time) so I figured I could continue to live with halogens (so long as they are robust and waterproof) and smile about the price; this would put me in the $5-600 budget range. I haven't looked at LED bars at all but see more around each day so will need to do some thinking. I only just scrape under the Cas car park so lights on the canopy/rollbar could only be a LED bar.

I'd be interested to know how this article, which appears pretty thorough, measures up to people's experiences. http://www.lightforce.net.au/images/pag ... %20LR2.pdf

Cheers.

An advantage of roof or roll bar mount would be that they done shake quite as much as on the front bar. Never had a drama with water in my lightforce. I'd go hid if you can afford it, I've got 100w lf halogen, they are pretty good but I've seen hid and they are awesome.

Find the halogen spotties you like and bang an $80 dollar HID kit in them, bright as and on the cheap.
As Ronje mentioned HID perform better with a spread or euro beam reflector IMO

I picked up 100 watt HID kits out of china for $102 landed for my rallye 4000s, they're quite good, though rallye 4's aren't known for their water resistance.

I have some standard IPF lights on my new 4wd, yet to try them in anger, ie underwater and on dirt roads.
The bull bar shakes like crazy on dirt roads but the driving lights are fairly stable on the hwy. I cant wait til i drive on dirt at night to test them out.

I had one of my 240 lightforce lights drown once. the reflector went black

Got a set of IPF on the zuke converted to HID
They are only 35 watt but light the place up like daylight
I sealed them out with sikaflex and they have done some scuba work lately with no problems
I'm running both as spread beams and visual off the sides of the road is excellent with enough penetration straight ahead
Very easy on my sad old eyes now for night driving
I will say though that road signs seem to reflect back at you hard with the HID's

I will say though that road signs seem to reflect back at you hard with the HID's

Even with Halogens, you realize that we have far too many road signs in some places!

Good and obvious advice though....invest in a tube of silastic!

My mate works for Hella and i was asking advice from him on spotlights and he told me that the HID kits that go into your old Halogens are`nt designed for the reflectors,that are in the Halogens and thats why street signs up like they do.I have HID`s in my old halogens and will be replacing them with the new LED Spotties from Hella.

smarty wrote:My mate works for Hella and i was asking advice from him on spotlights and he told me that the HID kits that go into your old Halogens are`nt designed for the reflectors,that are in the Halogens and thats why street signs up like they do.I have HID`s in my old halogens and will be replacing them with the new LED Spotties from Hella.

I call bullshit, given the reflectors may not be 100% correct but I have lightforce 240 HID FACTORY lights and all same same re reflective light from signs ..... I think its to do with the light frequency.

Punter is spot on (no pun intended) the mark.

Halogen lights radiate a yellow/redish light in the 4000K colour range of the visible light spectrum. Translate that to lower frequency towards infrared.

HID/LED lights radiate light in the 5500K - 6000K colour range. White light about halfway up the visible light spectrum but below ultra-violet.

The reflective signs have a coating which has a peak reflective quality in the 6000K range. Hence the signs are much more efficient reflectors when hit with white light. Only problem is that reflective material on the sign wording/symbol is made of similar qualities as the rest of the sign and its hard to read the bl..dy things (lack of contrast)!! Maybe the Transport Dept will wake up to that one day.

The advice from Smarty's mate was a bit off.

Matt Flynn will have an article on lights in his FFF magazine shortly. Irs designed to take out a lot of smoke-and-mirrors misinformation that abounds (like the Hella story).

I had a set of halogen IPF 900XS lights and they were awesome. Went swimming a heap of times before they got pinched. Next set will definitely have lock nuts.

i ll just put a vote for Great White Shark Led Lights, if your willing to pay the $$