need help with headlights on ford

[craigberesh]

I have a 2000 ford windstar. I live in southern California and drive city, desert and mountain roads. The headlights do not seem very bright. Anyone have any sudgestions on replacement bulbs. I may also be interested in any possible easy mods.

 

[TorchBoy]

Lots of people recommend http://www.danielsternlighting.com/.

 

[mds82]

are the headlights hazed over from pitting and debris hitting the headlight? If so you may want to do some research on sanding down your headlights to make them look like new. You can use 1000, 2000 and 4000 grit sandpaper , then buff them, and they should look at good as day 1 again.

 

[SafetyBob]

I was going to add that I believe they are called Diamond Clear headlight lenses. Actually, just getting cheap, new made in Korea or China knockoff's made a huge difference in my 93 Ford truck a couple of years ago. Went from hardly able to see at night to no problem at all now.

Bob E.

 

[-Virgil-]

Lamps advertised as "Diamond Clear" ("Euro Clear", "Diamond Cut", etc.), as well as the aftermarket OE-style replacement headlamps made in China or Taiwan, are trash. Beam formation and focus are grossly inferior to the original-equipment units, even poorly-engineered original units. All of the aftermarket lamps are physical copies (reverse-engineered) of OE lamps. Bzzzt! The level of precision required to create optics that work is much too high for any kind of physical copy process to be satisfactory. "OE-quality!" "SAE/DOT approved!", etc. Blah-blah-blah, not. You don't have to believe me, either; see for yourself (pdf)—epic fail! And the materials and build quality of the knockoff units are significantly inferior as well. And then there's a whole pile of rubbish coming in from China under names like Helix. Projector headlamp conversions, clear-lens conversions, "angel eye" knockoffs, etc...every bit of it completely dangerous.

Sanding and polishing hazed plastic lenses works briefly, and if the haze isn't too severe you can extend the lamps' life a couple times by polishing them with ordinary clearcoat-safe car polish, but with sanding what you're doing is scrubbing off the anti-UV hardcoat. The polycarbonate substrate will then degrade much more severely and much faster than before.

New OE headlamps are the only good and durable solution to degraded headlamp lenses and/or reflectors. Depending on the application, sometimes legitimate alternative headlamp assemblies are available (European-specification units, heavy-duty-spec units, etc.) which can offer an improvement.

If/once the lamps themselves are in good condition, the next step forward is to feed the bulbs properly (do go see Dan Stern's page on the subject) and installing intelligently-selected bulbs (skip the PIAA/Sylvania Silverstar/Höën/Nokya/all kinds of other pretend-brand blue-glass "whiter light" bulbs; the colored glass blocks a lot of light that would otherwise reach the road).

And make sure the lamps are aimed correctly!

 

[craigberesh]

Well,
no haze on the housing, just need to replace the bulb. So I am looking for a h4 bulb to buy. I still need a sudgestion on that. I know what not to buy but dont know what to buy

 

[Ken_McE]

Well,no haze on the housing, just need to replace the bulb.

Excellent!

So I am looking for a h4 bulb to buy. I still need a sudgestion on that. I know what not to buy but dont know what to buy

If you take a look at:http://www.rallylights.com/hella/H4.asp (chosen at random, I don't know anything about this particular company) you will see some characteristics they list for their H4 bulbs/

H4

The "H4" part refers to the mechanical size and shape of the bulb. Any H4 bulb should fit into any H4 socket.

12 Volt

The most common kind, and what you want for your Ford. If you bought 24 volt by mistake it wouldn't light, or would just have a sullen orange glow. If you bought 6 volt you would get a single blinding flash of light when you tuned it on, and then you'd need a new bulb.

Bulb Type

Halogen and Xenon refer to what's in the bulb. Both of these should be better (but probably pricier) than plain incandescent. "Hyper" and "Yellowstar" are their own words used for marketing purposes, there's no telling what they did to the bulb.

Coating

People put coatings on incan bulbs for cosmetic purposes. If you want your van to have mean blue or happy yellow lights that's fine, but if you want the most usable light you should pick no coating. All these coatings work by reducing the output of the bulb so that just one color is emphasized

Watts

Tells you how much power it needs to run properly. Within a given type of bulb more watts should equal more light. You might want to take a multimeter and see if a full twelve or thirteen volts is actually making it though the wiring harness to the headlight. Sometimes Ford cheaps out on their wiring harnesses, the headlights don't get full power, and you drive around wondering why the headlights seem so dim. The standard answer to this problem (if you have it) is to retrofit your own heavy duty wires to the bulbs so they are not starved for power.

Lumens

This is a critical one. More lumens means more light, and it is a measurement that it is hard for the manufacturer to lie or be misleading about. You will not be able to see small differences by eye.

Life

Means the expected time before failure. Sometimes a company will get more light by driving the filament particularly hard, this tends to give a short life product. Your call on which you value most, lifespan or output.

Color K

Refers to how "warm" or "cool" the color of the light is. The eye sees more than just one color as white and this helps you to know just which white to expect. Unless you have a show car, I wouldn't worry about this.

And as Scheinwerfermann said, aiming them right is important. You can have the brightest light in the world, but if it's all shining down on your bumper it won't help you.

Hope this helps.

 

[mweiss]

I have a 2000 ford windstar. I live in southern California and drive city, desert and mountain roads. The headlights do not seem very bright. Anyone have any sudgestions on replacement bulbs. I may also be interested in any possible easy mods.

I have a 1998 Ford Explorer, which had to have the worst headlight system ever made. For years, I tried replacing the bulbs with various "upgrade" bulbs but only managed to burn out the connectors and need to replace the entire wiring harness with a super duty harness. The connectors still burned out. After 7 years of dealing with that headache, I was on the brink of selling the truck and buying something with lighting that lights up the road.

I changed out the headlamp housings to Diamond cut housings, which improved the light output a bit, but it was still far short of my wife's '89 Mitsubishi.

I'd been looking at HIDs for 7 years, but they were $1500 in the beginning. Then I periodically checked on the state of the industry and came to the conclusion that there were no good bi-xenon 9007 HID replacements for a while. That changed this past summer, and, in late August, I was pointed to a place right in my home state of CT, who sells on eBay: http://stores.ebay.com/Retro-Solutions-LLC so I checked out the available kits and found a 55W HID kit that has hot-restrike protection and a much longer warranty than competing lights from China. If I recall correctly, the lifespan is 9,000 hours. So I bought a kit (wish they had been available before I spent a total of over $300 on bulbs and harnesses every 6 months) and installed it in my Explorer.

All I can say is, what a transformation! First of all, the daylight color temperature keeps me alert on dark rural country roads at night. And there is plenty of light--even when it's raining. I don't get drivers flashing their high beams at me anymore the way I did when I had the stock headlamps/housings. I can finally SEE where I'm going and I can see a deer on the side of the road 1/4-mile down the road, giving me ample warning of danger ahead.

No more burned up sockets, no more smoke-fogged reflectors from burning connectors and no more having to drive under the speed limit at night for lack of light. This HID kit solved my lighting problems like no other bulb could. 3100 lumens of output per bulb, over the 900 lumens I had with halogens. What a difference.

 

[LukeA]

Sanding and polishing hazed plastic lenses works briefly, and if the haze isn't too severe you can extend the lamps' life a couple times by polishing them with ordinary clearcoat-safe car polish, but with sanding what you're doing is scrubbing off the anti-UV hardcoat. The polycarbonate substrate will then degrade much more severely and much faster than before.

There's at least one headlight polishing kit at auto parts stores that includes a hardcoat replacement.

 

[-Virgil-]

Mweiss, your '98 Explorer's headlamps are not the worst ones ever made — not by a long shot. They're not great, but there have been much worse lamps on the road. The main problem with your system is the same problem plaguing the original poster in this thread: Ford's low-cost, too-thin headlight wiring starving whatever bulbs you install. You could have fixed this easily and inexpensively, and wound up with much better, much safer headlamps. Instead, you did not one but two things that severely degraded their safety performance. Most folks who do as you did think it's OK because (insert a few lines or paragraphs of marketing BS from their HID kit vendor here), and because they've got a giant spray of light coming from the front of their car, give the matter no more thought.

I changed out the headlamp housings to Diamond cut housings

You installed headlamp-shaped toys...

I checked out the available kits and found a 55W HID kit

...and then equipped them with a grossly wrong light source. Sure, you've got more light coming from your headlamps. It's spraying out in all directions, completely uncontrolled, and creating a serious safety hazard for you and everyone else on the road with you. I'll bet you don't care.

"HID kits" in halogen-bulb headlamps do not ever work safely or effectively, which is why they are illegal. See here.