Mike L

Hello All!

I have exhausted all of my efforts, time and patience in trying to locate decent used "Sport" OEM headlights for my truck. I have heard a lot of bad things about the aftermarket headlights and yes, I know that some of you have had good luck with them. However, after reading the e-mails from the seemingly very knowledgeable Daniel Stern, I have decided to try and keep with OEM products.

So, that being said I found some recent posts about changing the 9004 headlight bulbs to 9007 bulbs. Although the process itself seems quite straight forward the stuff that I have read doesn't address the issue of DRLS's, which we all have here in Canada. Has anyone in this chapter tried this bulb conversion and if so how did you address the DRL matter and how did you like the results?

Thanks for reading!

Cheers!

Mike

torquefan

I haven't done that upgrade, but I did install a relay harness and simply disabled the DRLs, which I was never a fan of anyway. A relay harness powering some Nighthawk Platinum bulbs gives you some reasonable gains for the minimal amount of work and expense required. I may still move up to Sport lamps in the future however.

I was reading about the 9004 to 9007 conversion yesterday, and do have some concerns.

- they all speak of removing the locating tabs from the housing, but nobody seems concerned about the orientation of the bulb in the housing, which I believe to be very important. 9004 bulbs are always oriented with the flat surface straight up, while 9007 bulbs are always oriented with the flat facing to one side or the other.

- the wiring pinout is different between the 9004 and 9007. One uses the centre pin for ground, while the other uses one of the side pins. Some who have done the conversion report switching two wires in the connector, some report switching all 3, some make no mention of it at all. So, naturally I am concerned how they can all feel that they have made a huge improvement in lighting.

I guess I am pretty picky when it comes to details like this, and want to be sure the beam is in the right place and not just throwing random light everywhere, but I'll have to try it before I will be a believer.

Holygrail12v

I just read up on this, and it says to have the harness laying with the flat side up looking at the wire side switch the left and middle wires. The feedback I have read on this so far everyone says it is a huge improvement. I will be doing this to my truck as soon as I order the suvlights.com wiring harness, so my headlights will be hooked directly to the battery so they get the proper voltage.

Homestead

I've been looking deep into this subject for awhile now and had the chance to talk to a Ram owner that did the conversion and saw the results. They are noticeably brighter but no definite pattern to the light output. They are just two blobs of light and he has adjusted them as best he could to get a decent "throw" of light, but there is no happy medium. He is going back to 9004's.

On top of that, all 3 wires have to be swapped
http://candlepowerinc.com/pdfs/9004_9007.pdf

I ended up ordering new Mopar lights and am sticking with the 9004 bulb. Yeah, I could of went with the Sport lights but stayed with what I have mostly because of price. Of all the night driving I do, it is usually late enough that traffic is less and I have a huge set of LightForce 240's to make up any shortages in output. Once we are back into Spring weather, I'll modify my harnesses and go with relays and such but for now, stock will do.

New headlights should be here this week and away we go.

Jeff

mtdoragary

I used the harnesses without relays that came with my DEPO's. But I connected only the outside lights. I now have low beams, but no high beams. So I'm guessing that if I connect the inside lights as well that they will come on as my high beams an I will be drawing no more current in either selction than I would with a single pair of 9007's.