Hey, y'all. First post (well, aside from the required „Me mine mods” post!) here.
Last year, my '92 Camry's headlights started seeming dimmer and dimmer to me, especially on the driver's side. I tried changing the bulbs, without any improvement. Polished the lens fronts carefully with „clear-coat safe” car polish, and that removed the yellow cloudy crud from the lenses, but they were still dimmer than I remembered from when they were new. When the left light started not coming on every time I would turn on the lights, I knew I wasn't crazy!
Spent some time dinking around with a voltmeter and everything seemed to be OK, I was seeing battery voltage (more or less) at the headlight socket regardless of whether the bulb would light or not, so I was like, „Huh?”. Didn't know about this forum then, so I was pretty much on my own. I knew the bulbs were fine, because any bulb would work consistently (but dimly) on the passenger side, but any bulb would only sometimes work (and dimly) on the driver's side. H'mmm.
Spent some time digging through wiring diagrams and mousing around on the web, found a page about headlight relays (it's on a commercial site, so I don't know if I'm allowed to post it, but I'll try it, and if this post gets nuked, well, I guess the answer is „No!”!) The page is here:
Headlight relays Long story short, we exchanged emails, and he had me measure the „segmentary volt drop” in my headlight circuit as described on the relay page. I came up with a total volt drop of 1.2V on the passenger side and 2.5(!) on the driver's side. Sent the results to the relay guy, he told me there was something wrong with my driver's side headlight wiring (Uhh...yeah...).
I ended up buying a relay parts package off him, spent a Saturday putting it in. I used the passenger side existing circuit to trigger the relays, just completely abandoned the flaky driver's side wires entirely. I didn't buy any bulbs at the time, because by this time I had four assumed-good bulbs and I wanted to see if the relays would make a difference.
Um...like...wow. Um...like...YES! Not only do both low and both high beam lights now come on whenever I ask them to, but they are WAY brighter and whiter than I can ever remember them being. And that was with just regular bulbs, not the "extra white" or "vision blue" kind. Before, the lights put out a brownish or yellowish light...now the lights are WHITE.
Only by now I was headlight-crazed. I sucked up all the info on the site where the relay page is, and went looking for more. (MORE INPUT! NUMBER FIVE WANT MORE INPUT!) I found this
page about new 9011 and 9012 bulbs , and was intrigued (OK, I admit it, any time I run into one of the maybe three people in the world who use „German-style quote marks like I do” I get intrigued) and sent out for some of the bulbs. They're expensive, but I've seen bulbs advertised for more money, so I figured what the he\\.
They arrived last Friday, so I drove around with them all weekend.
Oh. My. GOD! These things
RAWK! They don't have a blue coating on them, but they're even whiter and WAY brighter than the regular bulbs. No blue...just a shload of bright white light. I was a little worried about using them in the Camry's headlights because the article says they put out too much light to be used in reflector headlights, but (a) the Camry's low beam lights seem to have good control of upward wash light, and there's an internal bulb surround ring that evidently helps out here, and (b) I figured if there was too much glare or backscatter, I could just use 'em in my SC400, which does have projector beams.
Did I say I drove around with these bulbs in the Camry all weekend? That's not quite true. I also tried swapping 'em into the Lexus. Took me all of 30 seconds to decide to order another set so I can have them in both cars.
The Lexus seems to handle the light a little better because there's a sharp cut line in the low beam pattern, bright light below the sharp line and dark above it. But as I suspected, the Camry lights do just fine with it even without the sharp cut line in the beam. I would NOT want to use these bulbs in my brother in law's '03 Camry, I don't think. I've driven in front of him and even though his lights are correctly aimed, they are uncomfortably bright even with the regular bulbs.
God, I love it when I find stuff that works...now if only I could quit being a cheapskate on my tunes and spring for a new stereo for the Camry...it makes every song sound just like a helicopter!
GR...*blink*...GONE...
Linear Mode
