LED Headlight Conversion
Joe Angell
About 15 years ago I had the sealed beam headlights on the DeLorean with H4 halogens. This was done at DeLorean Motor Center in Garden Grove, CA, so I don’t have specific details about what was used or how it was done. 4” x 6” conversion kits are readily available, and Hella seems to be a popular quality brand.
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Updating to LEDs
A few years ago I replaced the lenses with new Hella 4” x 6” ones (basically a new conversion kit, since that’s how they sell them), as after over 10 years of driving the originals had gotten sandblasted by sand and other detritus on the road, making them foggy and diffusing the headlights, effectively shortening their range. This helped, but they were still not as bright as I’d like.
A recent thread on DCMTalk got me to look into LED headlights again. These days you can buy LED bulbs that match the position and pattern of H4 halogen bulbs. You install them just like halogens, and use standard halogen housings. The DeLorean sealed-beam wiring has some swapped wires compared to the H4 wiring, but you can either swap the pins on the connector yourself or buy an inexpensive adaptor from places like Amazon. Some conversion kits come with adaptors.
I bought two sets of AUXITO H4 9003 LED bulbs (each set containing two bulbs). These claim to have 12000 lumens per set (so, 6000 lumens per bulb), and are a cool white 6500K color. Being H4, they do both high and low beams. They were around $40 for a pair at the time. There’s no specific reason I chose these particular bulbs, other than that they had good reviews on Amazon.
The hardest part of installing them is getting the headlight housings out. The fascia covers the screws and has to be pushed out of the way. I wound up using a pry bar to get enough clearance, and then a power screwdriver with a long bit to remove the screws, careful not to drop any inside the fascia.
After that, you just remove the old bulbs from the housings and attach the new ones. You then either install the wiring adaptor or swap the wires on the socket so the high beams and low beams work correctly. Then reassemble everything, and try out your new beams.
The new LED bulb (left, front) and the old halogen (right, back)
The new LED bulb plugged into the H4 adaptor.
Adjusting the Aim
Since the new bulbs are so much brighter, you’ll really want to adjust the beams properly. I just googled for how to do it. The instructions I followed suggest parking the car about 25 feet away from a wall on level ground. I didn’t have that kind of setup, so I backed my car into the garage, then set up a folding table 25 feet from the headlights, laying on its side. This gave me a flat surface to shine my lights against.
You then want to aim the low beams so they’re pointing a little inward and downward, and the high beams straight ahead. The way to do this on level ground is to drive up to the wall, mark the center of the headlights with tape, and then back up the 25 feet. I just eyeballed it by getting next to the table and moving my head until I was blinded by the focused center of the lights, which gave me a decent idea of their aim, and adjusted them as needed.
Each light has two adjustment screws, with one above the housing and one to the side. Turning the screw out push the light away from the screw on that axis, and turning it in pulls it towards it. Mine were way out of adjustment, which likely wasn’t helping with the poor illumination from the old halogens.
The final result is that I have much brighter lights and it is much easier to see at night, especially with the high beams, and now that they’re aimed I’m not blinding other drivers anymore either.
Front Turn Signal Bulb
While we’re discussing exterior lighting: I had converted my marker lights and turn singles to LEDs a year earlier, but the passenger side front turn signal was burned out. Well, not completely, but it seemed like the LED module now had a fault and would barely light. You don’t need to have a car on the lift for a light, but it’s so low to the ground that it was much nicer to work on it raised up.
For some reason, the LED bulbs sit a bit loose in my turn signal sockets and don’t seem to make great electrical contact, but once I tightened everything up they seem to work perfectly fine. No idea what that’s about.