Electrical: Holley LED headlights?

[M-Webb]

I'm considering swapping out my old halogen headlights with these LED ones from Holley?

https://www.holley.com/products/electrical/led_lighting/retrobright/parts/LFRB135

This would be for my '61 Champ pickup. Seems like a pretty good, vintage looking lamp, which is a main goal to have more brightness (lumens) but not to have something that looks like a techie modern LED lamp. They are supposedly a direct, easy plug and play lamp. Price doesn't seem too bad and they also have a warm white color (3000K) as well as a cool white (5700K).

Anybody have any experience or thoughts on these? Any better vintage correct looking option to consider?

[M-Webb]

[gordr]

I'd like to see a side-by-side comparison between these lights and modern halogen sealed beams. Identical cars, same roads at night. How do they work to drive behind? Can you spot a deer 500 yards down the road? Do they blind oncoming drivers, and illuminate high-flying owls?

[Buzzard]

Michael,
I think you may be onto something as I have been a lighting upgrade afficionado for many decades. Any who follow my posts know my previous preferences for Cibie Biodes and Marchal Ampilux setups. Sure I get 460 watts on high beam but with required relays, heavier duty wiring etc., it comes at a cost most people would be unwilling to participate in.
Besides at our ripe old ages, plug and play makes way more sense. Thanks for bringing this product to our attention.
Bill

[M-Webb]

Gordr, I don't know about all of that, won't be scientifically testing it to that degree if I ever decide to go with them. But for what it is worth, it does say they meet or exceed SAE and DOT requirements. So I'll guess they are somewhat respectably compliant to acceptable levels of glare intensity and beam control as far as that goes. Whether you can see deer down the road or owls flying overhead with them might depend more on your own vision capabilities, but obviously more lumens will give you more chance at it.

Looks like my current lamps are GE 6012 which from what I can tell are incandescent 50/40 watt hi/lo beam lamps. I can't seem to find a lumen rating on them, but for 50/40 watts, I would guess it is maybe about 500-600 lumens on hi. The Holley LED lamps are rated for 3000/2000 lumens hi/lo. So should be quite a bit more light overall. My experience with lighting seems to pan out that it takes about 4 times as much lumens to make something look about twice as bright. Your eyes and brain do not "see" brightness in a direct linear way. So these might look about twice as bright or maybe a little more. Maybe slightly more if use the 5700K color vs the 3000K. I'm not sure of the spectrum and color rendering rating on these LEDs, but my guess it is better than the old incandescents as well. So the colors of things will likely have more pop to them as well, not be so dingy orangish.

[M-Webb]

[M-Webb]

Bill, I'm not even sure what Cibie Biodes and Marchal Ampilux setups even are, lol! And I'm actually fairly well versed in lighting, albeit more in the building world than automotive. So maybe that is an auto thing. Sounds very interesting whatever it is. But 460 watts! Wow, that is a lot. Yeah, I would say some relays and heavy duty wires would be in order. These Holley ones are only 30/25 watts hi/lo, so that is quite a bit less than the incandescent at 50/40 watts hi/lo. So a lot brighter AND less watts.

So far, the only drawback I am seeing is that they are $215 each, so would be a $500 project. Fortunately Champs only have 2 headlamps, not 4. Not crazy expensive, but not exactly cheap either. Up until now, I never really drove my truck at night enough to concern myself with it, and the technology wasn't good enough either to force it. But I might be trying to drive this truck across country to the international meet in Sept. and my vision is not as good as it use to be either. So maybe spending $500 on a potentially solid improvement and easy to do upgrade that still keeps the correct look to the truck is giving me reason enough to consider it.

If someone else here has had a good experience with them, I'm more inclined to do it. If not, I'll have to think more about it, see if I'm into it enough to be the first.

From what I can tell opening up the lamp housing, it looks like there is enough room there to fit the socket and wiring connector in and make it work. It might take some careful fitting to get it in, but looks doable. Hopefully without having to cut or modify anything. But if I spend $500 on these and something needs to get modified, guess they'll be getting modified.

[gordr]

Suggest that you check out daniel stern lighting dot com. He sells some very good quartz-halogen bulb-in-reflector headlamps to fit most any car, including Studebakers. For less money than those Holley LED's, too. You would need to upgrade the headlamp wiring and install headlight relays, but you would need to do that for the LED's, too. Lots of good tech info there, too.

[M-Webb]

Gordr, as mentioned, the Holley LED lamps draw LESS wattage than the original lamps. So there is no need for any wiring changes, relays or anything else. You just take the old lamps out, take the new ones out of the box, plug them in, put the trims back on and good to go. A lot more light, less wattage. Minus also a few extra $'s and about an hours worth of time start to finish working at a gentleman's pace.

[Colgate Studebaker]

Mike, I was the lead assembler on the Harley Davidson LED headlights made by J W Speaker in Wisconsin. That was 13 years ago when LED's were the new "big" thing. We made thousands of them every week and the biggest issue we struggled with was stray light which was the blinding light at oncoming traffic. The lights are excellent quality and the cost reflects that (at that time they were $500 each). Those were for the Harleys only and didn't fit in a car unless the light body was modified. Since I've been gone they have come out with automotive units, also very good quality. Price is unknown by me but I'm sure you can find info online. My word of caution is to check out the spec's and reviews of any LED light you're considering, especially stray light. Good luck with your project and please give us a review of whatever unit you go with. Bill

[gordr]

Those big finned things on the back of LED lamps are heat sinks, and they need circulating air to keep them cool. LED's are more efficient, but the switching power supply needed to create the correct voltage for the diode clusters does reject some heat.

[bensherb]

I no longer drive at night if I don't have to because of all these crazy bright headlights that blind me as an oncoming driver. On the country road I live off of it's not unusual for me to need to just stop in the road until the oncoming driver passes because EVERYTHING in front of me is wiped out by their lights and I'm completely blind.

[Dwight FitzSimons]

Exactly my case too.

[Lark Hunter]

Okay. I know that the answer I'll give probably isn't going to be the answer you want to hear, but here it is: Holley RetroBright headlamps aren't what you want, if you want to see properly at night. I'm taking this from some credible testing that was done back in the middle of 2022, not too long after they were released, and have no reason to suspect that anything has changed since then... It sadly looks like a private equity firm bought the rights to the Holley name (didn't they used to make stuff like carburetors?) and slapped said name on an assemblage of parts that could've produced a credible LED headlamp, then applied a fair amount of marketing and spin and adequately amped up prices to give a perception of the quality that wasn't there... all while probably hoping that that their audience didn't really drive their cars often enough at night to find out that the product actually cut the cheese instead of the mustard. It's too bad, because I'm sure there IS a market for a decently performing LED sealed beam replacement that doesn't look out of place on older vehicles (at least they offer it with emitters that aren't so far in the blue spectrum; they got that part right).

The SAE isn't a regulatory agency, so they don't approve anything... and the DOT markings thing is a self-certification process, wherein the manufacturer is stating that the product meets the applicable FMVSS 108 requirements. And of course not all of them actually *do*. I don't want to run too deep on automotive lighting minutiae here, as I've gotten some grief in the past, but there is a lot more to it than just farting enough lumens out that some of them hopefully hit in enough places for you to see where you're going without driving other drivers off the road... one example is that having too much foreground light can constrict your pupils and hamper your distance vision. Another is the high beams I used to use for spotting deer on highways in Montana, backscattered off the road signs in Arizona so badly... that I was almost afraid to use them.

As someone who drives a vintage vehicle at night at least five nights a week, I'm currently using 40 year old sealed beams... not even halogen sealed beams. My night vision is good, though. The roughest thing I encounter all too regularly is vehicles with ill-advised retrofits of LED "bulbs" into fixtures that weren't designed to use them, misaimed headlamps (many pickups pulling trailers), fogged over polycarbonate headlamps producing much glare and little light on the road... many drivers with one or more of the above defects often just drive with their high beams on all the time, probably in an effort to actually *see* with their improved lights, compounding the problems for anybody stuck coming toward them or in front of them.

But, if you're really on about getting more lumens per watt, and/or want something that isn't affected by gimpy wiring, there are some excellent LED options out there that will light up the road like a modern rig without searing the retinas of oncoming drivers... but do prepare for a level of sticker shock a couple rungs above the Holley jobs, and for an otherworldly appearance that won't jibe well with a Champ... J.W. Speaker and Truck-Lite have the product. Beefing up your headlight wiring to eliminate voltage drop to incandescent/halogen lamps will also help more than you'd think.

[blackhawk]

In 2018, I replaced the OEM sealed beam headlights in my ‘64 Cruiser with Hella headlamp conversion kits. The inner high beam headlamps (kit # HELLA 002425811) use Hella H1TB Standard 55 watt replaceable halogen bulbs. The outer high/low beam headlamps (kit # HELLA 002850811) use Hella H4TB base P43t-55/60 watt replaceable halogen bulbs. I think there are also kits for the larger single headlights. I am very satisfied with this upgrade. There isn’t any light scatter. They put the light right where it is supposed to be. The high beams shine way down the road, much further than the original sealed beam headlights. You can also use higher wattage bulbs if you need more light, but I found the 55/60 watt bulbs included in the kits to be plenty adequate. Of course, even the 55/60 bulbs require relays and heavier wiring. A little extra work, but well worth it for the improvement in night vision. ~Dale

[M-Webb]

Thanks for the thoughts and feedback guys, very much appreciated.

Full disclosure, I am actually a lighting designer myself, albeit, in the architectural profession, not automotive field. Have been doing it exclusively for 35 years now. So I do know a little bit about how light works, how it if is perceived and somewhat the technical aspects of the science of it and the in/outs of LEDs as well. I'm definitely not going to claim to be any expert at the automotive aspects of this issue though, so I have a bit to learn with that for sure.

With that said, one thing I have learned over the years is that the only thing you can trust with lighting is what you see with your own eyes and experiences, and pretty much that is it. No matter what technical anything ever gets put down on paper or any other way, your own eyes and brain decide on how effective or good/bad lighting is. One can analyze photometric reports and do calcs all you want. But at the end of the day, what one sees and feel trumps any of that no matter what. If you don't like what you see with your own eyes, no technical #'s or reports to the contrary is ever going to change that.

So that is why I posted this here first to see if anyone else has had any real actual experience with these lamps to go on. I can check all the technical stuff and know how to do that. But I'll take someone's personal experience on it over any of that if can.

Ideally I would just get a pair and try them out and if don't like them for whatever reason, just send them back I guess. But at close to $500 shot at that, not sure I want to risk it yet.

My truck also is fairly highly restored with what was a NOS wiring harness and that is all still in very nice original condition. So the wiring should be as good as it can be without modifying it, which I don't really want to do. Being in the lighting business, and fooling around with old cars for many years, I understand low voltage wiring and power to a reasonably decent degree. So I think I'm good on that part to it. Just trying to decide if these are worth trying out given the cost factor.

Regardless, I agree, it is not in my best interest to be blinding on-coming traffic either. So those points are good and appreciated as well. Will definitely be factored in if I proceed with these and how I evaluate them if so. Unlike a lot of other products, these do at least try to claim to follow DOT and SAE aspects. Now whether they do or not, or how well, that is open to debate of course, and real world visual evaluation.