You know it's true love when...

[Seanz0rz]

... your girlfriend buys you a set of lightforces for valentine's day! :love: :love: :love:

so she gave them to me a little early, making sure they were what i wanted before her return period expired.

they were perfect! a set of 170's, wrapped in shiny plastic!

when it came to installing them, i was pretty confident that they were not going to fit on my shrockworks bumper with the prerunner hoop. i was correct in that, so i had to come up with a bracket to mount them. i scrounged around the garage for a while looking for some 2" angle i had, but i found this 1.5" aluminum angle, already the perfect size! 4 holes later and it was mounted:
http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m141/hamiltoncomputers/Electrical%20and%20Lighting/IMG_2367.jpg

wires run through the factory shrockworks light mount holes and connect to the high beams.

oh yeah, and i bought a winch:
http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m141/hamiltoncomputers/Electrical%20and%20Lighting/IMG_2368.jpg

so here is a question for those in the know. id like to keep my low beams on when my high beams are on, as the headlights no longer handle high beam duty. how should i go about doing this?

[cplvc]

I don't have answers to your wiring questions, but the truck looks great!

[kregg]

Sean. Can I have your girlfriend? Just so she can buy me nice things for Valentine's day.

j/k!!

Looks great, and I too can't help ya on the lights... I'm just here for comic relief, although I didn't do a good job of that either...

We may need to move this post to the "Fail" thread...

[Erich_870]

Looking good!

I mean this next comment in the most polite way possible...please, please, PLEASE get rid those KC Dayligher covers! :hillbill: Every time you post pics I think of that song, "one of these things just doesn't belong..." :spit:

Erich

[Seanz0rz]

haha never!!! i love my happy faces! like the snorkel, they make me smile every time i see them!

i was considering painting little red dots between the 'eyes'.

thanks for the positive responses.

[Scuba]

so here is a question for those in the know. id like to keep my low beams on when my high beams are on, as the headlights no longer handle high beam duty. how should i go about doing this?



Wut ?

That doesn't make sense to me.
But.
My 170's are wired up in the fashion where the forces are completely seperate from the actual headlights.
I think I took the wire thats supposed to be wired into the highbeam, and just wired it to the battery..

[Erich_870]

haha never!!! i love my happy faces! like the snorkel, they make me smile every time i see them!

i was considering painting little red dots between the 'eyes'.

thanks for the positive responses.


Ha, you should. A custom touch would be cool.

Erich

[Seanz0rz]

ok heres a better explanation:

my headlights are HID, but they are not bixenon, basically meaning only the low beam is hid, the high beam is a small halogen that is out of the focal point of the lens, making it useless. the wire going to this halogen was cut and a relay put in its place that now controls my 170's.

so when i turn on my high beams, either pushing on or pulling to flash, my low beams go off, and my 170's come on.

desired result: when turning high beams on, i wish for the low beams to ALSO stay on. ideally id like them to not go off during the switch (the combination switch is break before make), but i would settle for just high and low beams when high beams are turned on.

my reason for doing this: with the HID's, i find i never need high beams unless its truly dark and the terrain demands it. in that case, there is rarely on coming traffic, or traffic in front of me, so i can justify using the LF's for that case. Also, the 170 are spots, and i like that, but would like the light from my low beams to fill in that intermediate area.

so:


switch position devices powered

off off
tail lights tail lights
low beam low beam and tail lights
high beam high beam, low beam and tail lights


i think i remember bruce had this same setup on his 4runner, but i am not positive.

should also mention, i am not using a LF wiring harness, i built my own (as i usually do) so it fits properly!

[CJM]

LOL Sean, I made the SAME exact mount for my T100 out of a bedframe rail.

[Obi..]

All I read was "..G/F..." and "..headlights...", which in any relationship are always a good thing to play with. :tapedshut:

Looks good, great lady you have there, mine just gave me a good %'age of the tax return to have for funding for a while until I start work again.

As for the high/low option, I don't have the schematic available, but it is in ih8mud's forums, in the 80 series or 95.5+ FAQ's. Try a search there, if I get the chance and see you haven't found the link, I'll post it here. IIRC you have to make a harness that has two relays to keep the load on the circuit from frying the factory wiring by drawing too many amps.

[corax]

so here is a question for those in the know. id like to keep my low beams on when my high beams are on, as the headlights no longer handle high beam duty. how should i go about doing this?



Are your headlights controlled on the ground side? if so, this should work - don't forget to include the requisite fuses etc

the high beam relay/switch controls your relay, when it switches to ground it energizes the relay and provides the ground path for the low beams

red is wiring and taps that you add

http://i280.photobucket.com/albums/kk171/batardsalamano/headlightwiring.jpg

[Obi..]

*This topic is close to what I am talking about, the Slee harness, but a little modified so that you are running the high beams with the low beams as the aux while keeping the spots/floods on their own circuit as well as the stock lows still in the stalk. (http://forum.ih8mud.com/80-series-tech/347123-slee-9005-9006-upgrade-harness.html)

ie: http://www.sleeoffroad.com/products/harness_main.htm

For the life of me I cannot remember the site the guy is from who does all the aftermarket light support and has all the needed schematics to reference..Keith, who is it, it's bothering me now..and of course it's 4pm here and I can't reach Christo until tomorrow.

[Seanz0rz]

Thanks Keith and shane. For some reason I'm having a hard time picturing what I need to do, but I know it's not that hard. I think I need a good nights sleep and another wiring diag to look at.

Here is what I'm thinking: insert a relay parallel to the low beam ground that closes when high beams come on. Howsthat sound or is there an easier way?

[corax]

Congrats on the new bling - first a snorkel for desert wheeling and now Lightforces (pfft, web wheeler/mall crawler :flipoff:)



Here is what I'm thinking: insert a relay parallel to the low beam ground that closes when high beams come on. Howsthat sound or is there an easier way?


get some sleep man, that's pretty much what my piss-poor drawing is

[4x4mike]

Looks good. It also looks like you have the wiring figured out. With pretty much non functional high beams the LF's coming on with the high beam switch sounds like a good idea. Personally I like the lights to be separate so I can use just the high beams if I want and just the bumper lights if I want. I'll let you slide because of your high beam problem :P

Which winch did you end up going with? How does everything feel, weight wise, up front with the bumper and winch combo?

[Seanz0rz]

Smittybilt xrc8. Post coming soon

[troyboy162]

sean i like the daylighters lol. thats timeless offroad style right there.

[4x4mike]

The xrc8's seem to be working for people. I think you can get them for the same price they came out with and I even toyed around the idea of picking one up.

[CJM]

The smittybilt is what I been wanting whenI finally get something I can mount it on. I dont recall which offroad mag it was, perhaps petersens-but they ran the smittybilt thru the gambit and it was great apparently.

[Seanz0rz]

quality was pretty good from what i experienced while installing it. havent got a chance to use it yet. alot of people say the cable is junk. i made sure to unspool and give it a good coating of PB blaster to keep the rust off of it. early models were slow and prone to rust on all the components, this one looks a little better built than that, and is certainly quick enough.

for me, i couldnt justify spending 800 on a warn to use it once a year. i am not a hard core rock crawler. this is for emergency extrication only.

[L33T35T Tacoma]

I've used my XRC8 Comp series on 3 separate occasions now, 2 which were very hard pulls. No problems with it at all!

[CYi5]

for me, i couldnt justify spending 800 on a warn to use it once a year. i am not a hard core rock crawler. this is for emergency extrication only.


I hear ya on that point. From what i've read they are slow but reliable. One website was selling the xrc8 with synthetic line for $399; that's just nuts! I'll probably still pick up the summit 9k whenever they go on sale again for $405.

[troyboy162]

off topic but i saw a nice expensive warn winch in action a few weekends ago and yes the line speed is faster but fast is not a term to use with a winch pulling a load lol. line speed is deathly slow when weight is applied even to a warn. i think the xrc8 will change the winch industy toward less profit and greater value to the customer

[ttora4runner]

Looks good. Are you using the switch that came with the light or are you using a factory toyota switch? Did she get you any color filters?

The lights will fit with the prerunner hoop. There are two different mounts for the lights. One is lower profile version that sets the lights lower down but you can't use the holes shrockworks puts into the bumper you'd have to move the hole over about an 1" to 1.5".

The mount you came up with was a good idea. :thumbup:

[2ndGen]

sean,

I would just weld 2 light tabs on the hoop, mount the 2 lights upside down. it doesn't effect the performance but that puts them behind the hoop. in case yo bump into some thing, they will be safe.

[CJM]

Oh sean, make sure you move that light bar bracket you made and put some kinda rubber or something behind it so it wont cause rust! I found out the hard way.

[Seanz0rz]

sean,

I would just weld 2 light tabs on the hoop, mount the 2 lights upside down. it doesn't effect the performance but that puts them behind the hoop. in case yo bump into some thing, they will be safe.


thought about that and here is why i didnt: the "breather" for the lights is on the back of the arm, and points down when installed upright. if i installed them upside down, now they will catch all the water and dirt, etc that i see on and offroad. it would just pool in there and not allow the light to breath through the goretex filter, and that stuff would probably work its way in eventually.

i had considered getting the low pro mounts, but upon further inspection, even then the lights would not clear the bar, i would have to, like you said, drill new holes in the bumper. with a winch in the bumper, there isnt alot of room to install there anyway, so i decided against it.

i also considered welding tabs to the hoop to mount them upright on top of the hoop. but then it makes engine access even harder than it is now.

as for rust, the bumper was covered in heavy rust primer (it was nearly bare metal, just some tiny surface rust starting) and 2 very thick coats of rustoleum hammered paint. ive been fighting rust on the truck for a while, but its nothing like what you gents have on the east coast.

[CJM]

Mine rusted sean cause I had it on the chrome bumper and the water got trapped between it.

Since I routinely change honda civic batteries and they have this nice 1/8 thick rubber pad I always keep I cut one up and glued it on using some superglue. Only rust was around the holes then.