cluosborne

Review - Hella Micro DE Fog lamp kit and E-Code headlamp with 100/55W H4 halogen bulbs.

With an upcoming road trip to Vancouver Island in May, I felt that upgrading the lighting was critical since I could encounter any kind of weather. The particular car I have is a 1988 RX7 GTU. However, this review applies only to the lights. There are some vehicle-specific installation notes.

First, the Hella E-Code conversion headlamps. Rather than write up the differences between E-Code and DOT, I'm going to simply link to the site I bought my lighting from, Rally Lights, that provide an excellent page on the differences between the two lamps and other beam types:

http://www.rallylights.com/hella/Beams.htm

I'll give you the summarized version below:

E-Code lamps put more light on the road than DOT lamps, which results in a sharper beam cut-off. The reason is that DOT requires that some of the light from the headlamps light overhead road signs. E-Code, or Euro specification, requires that all the light go on the road--signs must have their own lighting or be highly reflective.

More light on the road was the reason I chose E-Code over DOT. However, E-Code headlamps are not DOT legal in the US, so use at your own risk. Since I do most of my driving during the day, and the lights are kept retracted from the casual viewer, this is mainly a non-issue for me.

I ordered my E-code lamps with 100W highbeam and 55W low beam halogen bulbs. They come in cardboard boxes with the bulbs and rubber boots enclosed. They are high quality, with glass and metal housings and reflectors.

You don't need H4 plug adapters for your FC lighting, but you will have to cut the boots to allow the plug to fully seat. They are made in Germany.

Once I installed and tested them, I found that they did, indeed, have a sharp cut-off point, and were an improvement over stock sealed beam.

Bottom line: They're are good upgrade to get, accept a variety of bulbs (including HID), and are easy to install.

Be sure to aim the headlights properly.

--

Micro DE Fog Lamps

Initially, I was disappointed with package itself. Though it includes everything you need to install and use the lamps, there were a few let-downs for me.

First, the light switch. It's a simple circuit board with one red and one green LED and a single push-button switch encased in a gloss black plastic housing with double-sided tape. Frankly, the look and feel of the switch was flimsy and cheap. However, the board and components themselves looked good and the switch worked perfectly.

Second, the wiring harness. They used unsealed connectors everywhere, even at the lamps--which I feel is a weak point since fog lamps are mounted low on a vehicle's front end and are exposed to moisture and other elements. The wire and crimps are of good quality, but don't expect the insulation to handle high-heat sources (nor should it by design). If using a heat gun, be careful not to melt the insulation off. Finally, given the type of car it was going into, the runs of wire for the lamps were too long. Rather than bundle excess wire, I extensively modified the harness--more on that later.

Third, I found that the ground spades inside the lamp housings, where the ground wires plug in, bend easily. This was due to the fact that the push-on connectors are tight and make connecting them a little difficult. Fortunately, they haven't broken, and the included boots seal out the elements very well.

For the cost of $122, I thought I was ripped off. That is, until I finished hooking them up and turned them on. Most of the cost is for the bulbs, lamp housings and the design of the lenzes and reflectors, which are small, yet sturdy and bright. It appears as if Hella sacrificed the quality of the harness and switch for the lights and mounting hardware--understandable.

The housings themselves have a glass lenz, a satin black plastic trim ring that's very sturdy looking, and a gloss black painted magnesium housing. They are mounted with black steel mounting brackets, bolts, screws and washers that feel beefy and are very well-made.

Please note that the screws that mount the brackets to the lamp housings are tap screws--there are no threads in the housings, so be careful not to over-tighten.

They include instructions for installation, wiring and aiming on a single sheet that is well-written and clear. I had no problems with wiring them up at all.

Bottom line: they're worth it for applications where size is of consideration, but get your own fog lamp switch and make your own wiring harness--or modify the existing one to your particular application.

--

Below are my FC-speific installation notes and harness modifications.

As for the installation, it was fairly straight forward. With the FC, I ended up modifying my front bumper cover by cutting the grille on both sides, making it look nice by making the cuts at an angle, and then capping the cut sections off with ABS plastic, smoothing it out with spot putty (in thin coats, letting it dry throughly), and painting them satin black.

I modified the harness by replacing the connectors to the lamps with weatherpac connectors. The relay included with the harness is a good quality unit, as is the weatherproof fuse holder and 20 Amp fuse. To add some weather resistance, I filled the back of the relay socket with electrolytic grease and then wrapped it in silicone tape. After routing the wires and determining what I needed, I cut the wires to length, replaced the unsealed crimp connectors (ground and lead wires use crimp rings) with heatshrink crimp connectors, and protected them with a combination of their black plastic sheaths and silicone tape at the ends.

The wires for the switch are of small gauge (they only carry the current to switch the relay), which makes them easy to route into the interior. However, I had to make an extension so I could mount the switch in the center console. The original switch was designed to be mounted on the dash. I cut off the small 3-pin connector and crimped on three 1/4" push-on plugs and used a 3-pin housing. The harness extension is merely three wires, sheathed in some extra plastic left-over sheathing from the harness, and run into the center console, terminated with three 1/4" push-on female connectors for the switch.

There's one more wire of note. The fog lamps are wired into the low beams so that they can only be lit with the low beams on. Oddly, the wire itself is an 18-gauge wire spliced into a thinner 20-gauge wire. Since the high-beam/low beam relay is right next to where I finally mounted the relay, I snipped the larger wire and crimped the smaller wire and original OEM low beam wire onto a new 1/4" female connector, which goes right into the factory relay socket. The relay itself mounted right next to the other relays in front of the core support.