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Your car lights and bulbs!
The right car-lights for today’s traffic can be the difference between being safe or having an accident. Advances have rapidly progressed over the past 5 years. Better technologies are being used for car-lights and these advanced designs are making driving safer than ever before. The character of a car is often created by car light design and placement and they can make a car look like a frog or a raging samurai. Some cars lighting systems are so advanced they come with auto-leveling and a host of other sophisticated modules. Trying to replace a burnout headlight is no longer what it used to be. The current trend is towards Xenon based car lights. Unfortunately, trying to replace one by yourself is not easy. They are highly complex car light systems that are best left to the professionals. Their complexity comes from the way they discharge light through exciting plasma among other things. With the improvement in designs have also come improvements in performance. Today’s car lights are brighter, more focused, and have greater longevity than ever before. You don’t need to go out and buy a new car if you would like to benefit from adding some better lighting capacity to your car. If your car has replaceable type bulbs, you can replace the old bulbs with new ones. There are numerous car lights available today that will allow you to install HID driving lights to your vehicle. Replacing HID headlights may need a degree, but installing driving lights only takes some tools, patience and a few hours. First, measure the opening where you want to install the driving lights. If the car already has driving lights, and you are looking to upgrade then just swap the old ones out. If there are no pre-designated areas for the lights, you will have to select one. Select an area where the securing bolts of the driving lights can run through metal. You don’t want to fasten the lights to ABS or other plastic. The PIAA kit comes with some pretty intensive 2-sided tape to hold the lights to just about any surface. However, we would recommend against this. If you have the tools, it is far better to actually do a more permanent install. The tape option is probably best used by those that are leasing their vehicles. Attaching the lights to a surface that isn’t stable will cause the beam of light to severely vibrate. Drill a hole in the selected area. Hold the drill steady because it could slide around on you on the slick plastic. You can prevent this by starting with a small drill bit and drill your hole with it first. Then use the proper drill bit size to make the final hole. Place the securing bolts into the holes and tighten loosely. Don’t tighten the bolts all the way because you will need to aim your lamps later in the install. Most lights will come with pre made wiring harnesses and the PIAA kit is no exception. The kit comes with a wiring harness that is almost plug and play. It is a very clean install as the PIAA kit also includes wire ties and tapping connectors. Connect the pre wired assembly to the positive terminal of the battery. Find a grounded point on your cars frame and attach the negative lead to it. It may be simpler to attach it to the negative terminal of the battery but directly connecting both the positive and negative leads to the battery could play havoc with the electrical system. Run the driving light switch through a grommet in the firewall. Mount the switch in an empty knockout on the dash. Next, aim your new driving lights by parking your car about 2 meters away from a wall with the front of the car facing it so that the lights shine on the wall. Turn on your high beams. Aim the beams of the driving lights so that they shine above the high beams by a ¼ of their pattern. The remaining ¾ pattern should be enveloped by the beam from the high beams. This is the set-up if you plan to run your’ driving lights most of the time while having your low beams on. Note: Some laws do not allow driving lights on at the same time as having the high beams on. Some manufactures OEM driving lights automatically switch off when the high beams are active. Check with your local laws.
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