New to forum, old to lights (2 questions on Hella 4000 for my golf)

axlehop2

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Hello to all. I am looking at updating my 2018 VW golfs halogen headlights. Not changing bulbs, and certainly not "retrofitting LED". Looked at the LED and bixenon options that the GTI has , way too expensive. In my last car (2012 dodge charger I mounted 2 kc 130 w compact pencil beam and 2 kc compact 100w fogs behind the lower grill. Very clean look..the Pencils worked great the Fogs, aimed so as too supplement, worked well and I was very careful with cutoff. Both were wired in with relay to the high and low respectively. I am considering Hella 4000's, pattern TBD

MOUNTING, a "license plate" bracket makes sense, but the weight and jiggle of a large aux light concerns me as the plate mount is on what is essentially plastic bumper cover, I think they will wiggle like hell, I have some ideas to reinforce the plastic behind, but an ideal solution it some sort of bracket that holds the "top" of the light, but all i can find after much searching is http://www.volkswagengolf.se/viewtopic.php?t=38907 , which looks a bit scrappy to me. Any ideas?

BEAM: I am thinking one Euro/driving beam with hi beam, and maybe a fog light (yeah, i know, close range lighting vs where you want it, but I want the cutoff so I wont be a ****** to oncoming). The CORNERING beam seams better but I cant find out if it has a cutoff, if it does, great. Do any of you know if a HELLA 4000 cornering beam have a low beam light cutoff?

PS I have searched (30 min plus) and have not had this answered yet.

PPS Umm duh, but when i tried to attach photo using the ATTACH, it asks for a URL, not "browse"

thanks
 
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Alaric Darconville

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Re: New to forum, old to lights ( 2 questions on Hella 4000 for my golf)

:welcome:
I am looking at updating my 2018 VW golfs halogen headlights. Not changing bulbs, and certainly not "retrofitting LED".

Good on not retrofitting LEDs! However, there are some better bulbs that maintain legal compliance and improve your ability to see.

Looked at the LED and bixenon options that the GTI has , way too expensive.
Sometimes (SOMETIMES) you can score the complete lamp assemblies from a car in a scrapyard, but it may be hard to track something that recent down.

In my last car (2012 dodge charger I mounted 2 kc 130 w compact pencil beam and 2 kc compact 100w fogs behind the lower grill. Very clean look..the Pencils worked great the Fogs, aimed so as too supplement, worked well and I was very careful with cutoff.
They can't have worked well, being behind a grille like that. That interferes with the beam pattern greatly. And that's on top of that brand typically selling a warranty FIRST, product second (the 23-year warranty makes a great selling point, and what they lose in replacements they make up for in initial sales and huge word-of-mouth advertising).

a "license plate" bracket makes sense, but the weight and jiggle of a large aux light concerns me as the plate mount is on what is essentially plastic bumper cover, I think they will wiggle like hell, I have some ideas to reinforce the plastic behind, but an ideal solution it some sort of bracket that holds the "top" of the light
The Carr Light Wing used to be regularly recommended but they're not great for heavy lamps, and are very dependent on a stable mounting surface. The bumper covers most cars have ain't them.

In this post and down KingofWylieTX did some creative mounting.

Here's what I did with some Hella XLs (based on the Comet 550) on a '95 Previa.

The mounting on that VW Golf forum by MarcusJ looks interesting and solid but could make opening and closing the hood a real pain! I should run the site through a translator to see if they mentioned that themselves.

BEAM: I am thinking one Euro/driving beam with hi beam, and maybe a fog light (yeah, i know, close range lighting vs where you want it, but I want the cutoff so I wont be a ****** to oncoming). The CORNERING beam seams better but I cant find out if it has a cutoff, if it does, great. Do any of you know if a HELLA 4000 cornering beam have a low beam light cutoff?
Fog lamps should not be used as auxiliary low beams. They are fog lamps, designed to light road edges and a little foreground for very low-speed crawls in inclement weather. And while a good fog lamp won't generate much *direct* glare for other drivers, they'll generate additional specular glare for others. Finally, they interfere with seeing in the distance due to the oversaturation of foreground light.

For the other auxiliary lamps, auxiliary high beams have the same restrictions with respect to oncoming/forward traffic as the standard high beams, so use them carefully and cutoff isn't an issue.

Some auxiliary low beams don't have as much of a cutoff, so dimming them as traffic gets closer (or as you approach a car from behind) is still a must.

PPS Umm duh, but when i tried to attach photo using the ATTACH, it asks for a URL, not "browse"
Attaching files is available to Admins, Moderators, and Supporters (a paid subscription)(and I would guess Vendors, too). But you can still use IMG tags to point to a picture on a site that you own. Using IMG tags to point to a picture on another website, even a forum site where you had uploaded the picture, is hotlinking and against our forum rules as it uses the remote site's bandwidth.
 
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-Virgil-

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Hello to all. I am looking at updating my 2018 VW golfs halogen headlights. Not changing bulbs

Why not? Replacing original-equipment long-life (less-light, lower-luminance) low beam bulbs with
these or these is low-hanging fruit in your quest.

Looked at the LED and bixenon options that the GTI has , way too expensive.

They might be too expensive for your budget, but they're worth what they cost; we don't get what we don't pay for. You might hit www.hollanderparts.com or www.car-part.com and see what you can score.

In my last car (2012 dodge charger I mounted 2 kc 130 w compact pencil beam and 2 kc compact 100w fogs behind the lower grill. Very clean look

It might have looked "clean" (however that might be defined), but this collection is a real dog's breakfast in terms of actual function. For one thing, we don't measure light in watts, and as bulb wattage goes up, many aspects of actual lamp effectiveness go down fast and hard. At the same time, you feel like you have awesome lighting while all you're really doing is screwing yourself and everybody else unfortunate enough to encounter your car on the roads. And then there's what Alaric mentioned: mounting lamps behind a grill is highly counterproductive.

the Pencils worked great

For what purpose? Spot/pencil beams are good for very long, very straight roads driven at very high speed. Not much practical use other than that. And they're utterly useless when mounted low, down in or below the bumper.

the Fogs, aimed so as too supplement, worked well and I was very careful with cutoff.

There is no such thing as aiming fog lamps "so as to supplement" -- that isn't a thing. And no matter where you put the cutoff, a fog lamp mis-equipped with a 100w bulb is basically a glare cannon not only for other drivers, but also for yourself, because you're super-massively overlighting the foreground and destroying your distance vision. Your pupils constrict in response to the super-bright close-range light and your distance seeing goes to zero, meanwhile you're sitting there cheering about your "awesome" lights because that's what it feels like.

MOUNTING, a "license plate" bracket makes sense, but the weight and jiggle of a large aux light concerns me as the plate mount is on what is essentially plastic bumper cover, I think they will wiggle like hell

They will; this is a non-starter. You need to mount the lamps to a rigid, structural (metal) member.

I think any of the Rallye 4000s are way too big and heavy for practical mounting on a Golf.

a fog light (yeah, i know, close range lighting vs where you want it, but I want the cutoff so I wont be a ****** to oncoming)

Wrong all the way. There is no benefit in terms of your ability to see, only detriment, to what you're planning here. And (again) regardless of cutoff position, you're going to be producing unsafe levels of glare to other drivers.

The CORNERING beam seams better but I cant find out if it has a cutoff

It doesn't.

What exactly is it you're trying to achieve? So far it sounds like your goal with the Golf (and your '12 Charger) is to throw a bunch of light around for the sake of throwing a bunch of light around. Throw in apparently deliberate misapplication of fog lamps, misinformed dismissal of the serious glare issue by saying "Oh, it's OK because I aimed the cutoff", and now it begins to sound like your goal is to be that guy. If that's not your intent, you're on the wrong road, headed the wrong direction, and barking up the wrong tree. All at the same time.

The first questions to answer should be the basic, simple ones: where and when do you need more light, for what kinds of driving conditions?
 
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irsa76

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Firstly, why do you want/need better lights? Are your OE headlights aimed correctly, this may be a shock to you but new cars don't always have properly aimed lights.
Since you have a current model VW with halogen lights I would assume you've found them seriously lacking, as most people do. Fitting aux lights will improve high beam, but will do nothing for low beam.
First step after checking the aim would be fit better bulbs, as recommended above. If you feel you still need better high beam then by all means fit a pair of Rallye 4000s, the "euro beam" is a good all round compromise. A pair of them on a sturdy mount will work fine for all roads. As mentioned before, spot beams are only really usefull on straight roads, although some "spot" beam patterns are abit wider than others and work OK for twisty roads. Cornering beams are great for really twisty roads or roads through dense wooded areas, very good spread pattern. I've previously run a combination long range spot beam on the driver's side and a cornering beam on the kerb side and found it to be a very good compromise, using Cibie Oscar SC. I've also tried a combination of 2 pencil beam and 2 euro beam Hella rallye 1000s, on the same car, and found them to be disappointing.
As for mounting them, the licence plate brackets can be made to work, I've used them in the past, the aforementioned Cibies were mounted on one on all the cars they were fitted to, with suitable bracing. On 2 cars it was bolted through the impact beam behind the plastic fascia, using 10mm bolts.
 

Supur-Lyte

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