Great car with what are the world’s worst headlights. High intensity bulbs?
What is the question? Do you have HID’s? What year? Are the lens yellow?
Details?
High intensity bulbs?
And what about them?
Yes, great car.
Yes, high intensity bulbs.
??? }|-/
Sorry for rushing through the issue. I need to improve the headlights on my Civic. Would the hi intensity bulbs be the way to go?
I assume this is not a new car. The lights should be fine. Have you looked at the lenses to see if they are foggy or yellow? If so they have several cleaning kits on the market. If it is the lenses new bulbs will not make much improvement.
Spray clear coat on the lenses to improve clarity.
short sweet and to the point. nice post rajdg. the expert answered your question before you could even re phrase it. you sound busy tho, and may be gone already.i type slow
Raj, would you be so kind as to describe what about your headlights you consider poor?
The year of your Civic would be a big help too. The car’s age matters.
Any Civic made within the last 20 years should be fine as long as the lenses are clear, there are good quality bulbs installed, and there are no issues such as a weak battery or corroded battery connections or bulb sockets.
You have to open up and tell us what’s wrong before we can make any serious recommendations.
And, by the way, there’s no such thing as “high intensity bulbs”. You may be thinking of “high intensity discharge (HID) bulbs”. They do sell aftermarket conversion kits, but without knowing the actual problem it’s impossible to say whether they’re a resolution to your problem.
You can fix yellowed lenses with a kit. The best kit I have heard is from Sylvania. Includes all you need. The last step is the UV coating. This will keep them from yellowing.
@knfenimore
I actually bought and used the Sylvania kit for my Camry. I followed the instructions to a T, and the results weren’t good. A few months later, the UV coating was peeling off, and I was back to where I started.
I can’t recommend that particular brand.
I’ve restored a number of fogged, yellowed headlights, and the best success I’ve had was using regular polishing compound (from the paint department) with a well-wetted round sponge mounted in a regular variable speed hand drill. I simply made a hole in the center of a $3 round sponge, mounted it on a regular arbor that’s generally used for a sanding pad, and it worked beautifully. I did not go through the ever-decreasing micron size that one would if doing a paint job. I just got a can of regular polishing compound, no micron size specified.
I recommend taping off the surrounding area to prevent hitting the paint of you miss. My aging hand isn’t as steady as it used to be. I waxed the lenses after polishing them, and that seemed to preserve the newly polished surface.
mountainbike
Let me ask some straight out questions
Are you condemning the headlight restoration kits?
Are you saying they don’t work?
Or are you saying the regular polishing compound works better?
Nope. I’m only passing on my own experiences. I have no doubt that the kits work great. I’m sure that any polishing compound with a media-suspended fine abrasive would also work great. I’ve even read of people using toothpaste successfully.
“You may be thinking of “high intensity discharge (HID) bulbs”. They do sell aftermarket conversion kits, but without knowing the actual problem it’s impossible to say whether they’re a resolution to your problem.”
The problem with installing HID bulbs in a car that did not originally come equipped with them is that the headlights’ reflector is very likely not going to work well with those bulbs. Putting those bulbs into the original headlight housing can easily create blinding glare for oncoming drivers–and that is a safety hazard for everyone on the road.
You are spot-on as usual, VDC. But I guessed that was what the OP was referring to by “high intensity lamps”. Unless the OP posts again, we’ll never know.
My own experience says that the kits do NOT work great
Because I bought the most highly rated kit out there, followed directions perfectly, and it was essentially a waste of time and money
“Unless the OP posts again, we’ll never know.”
We’re all playing guesswork as a result of the sketchy information that was provided to us…