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i just picked up a pair of ACA-like headlights to improve night time visibility. Question I have is what kind of bulb does the ‘brights’ socket take? I’ve attached a close up of a photo of the housing in question..
Be VERY careful when mounting them. The mounting tabs are fragile as hell. I would suggest going in 1/2 turn at a time and backing out 1/4 turn to make sure the debris doesn't build up and crack.
Last edited by TheRadioFlyer; Feb 18, 2019 at 10:06 AM.
Sure. A steel wire, usually. No way he took it off to give a better picture of the socket, right? Grow up kiddo. The three small square notches sure looked 9003ish to me, though obviously radioflyer has seen more of these than anyone on the planet, so I'm certain his is the correct answer.
Sure. A steel wire, usually. No way he took it off to give a better picture of the socket, right? Grow up kiddo. The three small square notches sure looked 9003ish to me, though obviously radioflyer has seen more of these than anyone on the planet, so I'm certain his is the correct answer.
Correct.. no locking wire clip of any sort.. how I took the picture is exactly how they came out of the box.
I managed to get the knock-off ACA style headlights installed, with a couple of interesting points..
Interesting Point #1 - Why so many wires and connectors?
After spending some time installing and positioning the (2) harnesses that came with the lights in decently obscure places to reduce visual detection under the hood, I realized there appeared to be too many connectors with seemingly incompatible ends.. After scratching my head for about 10 min, I made the decision to see if I could simply bypass them and use the standard Corvette headlight connector to feed the input side of the HID ballast and voila - it worked! I then connected the halo ring option to the parking lights (corner marker lights) to pick up the needed 12v and to have the halos on when I 'switched back' on the headlight stick. This also worked great.
Interesting Point #2 - I thought a 55w Ballast HID would not have the headlight retraction issue
Well, not so lucky I suppose. I've read here on several threads that the headlight retraction issue happens with 35w ballasts and not with the 55w ones. Well, I can tell you that isn't the case for me. Not a huge deal, just turn the highbeams on and then they'll retract perfectly. Still though, unclear why this is happening.
All in all a fairy easy setup thanks to all those who were kind enough to document and post their efforts here with pic and excellent explanations! Thank you all!!
I managed to get the knock-off ACA style headlights installed, with a couple of interesting points..
Interesting Point #1 - Why so many wires and connectors?
After spending some time installing and positioning the (2) harnesses that came with the lights in decently obscure places to reduce visual detection under the hood, I realized there appeared to be too many connectors with seemingly incompatible ends.. After scratching my head for about 10 min, I made the decision to see if I could simply bypass them and use the standard Corvette headlight connector to feed the input side of the HID ballast and voila - it worked! I then connected the halo ring option to the parking lights (corner marker lights) to pick up the needed 12v and to have the halos on when I 'switched back' on the headlight stick. This also worked great.
Interesting Point #2 - I thought a 55w Ballast HID would not have the headlight retraction issue
Well, not so lucky I suppose. I've read here on several threads that the headlight retraction issue happens with 35w ballasts and not with the 55w ones. Well, I can tell you that isn't the case for me. Not a huge deal, just turn the highbeams on and then they'll retract perfectly. Still though, unclear why this is happening.
All in all a fairy easy setup thanks to all those who were kind enough to document and post their efforts here with pic and excellent explanations! Thank you all!!
For informative purposes:
Point 1: These lights are designed to operate on a relay-based system using the factory harness as a trigger. I'm believe this makes the linking of the low and high beam function possible (similar to our Hi-4 harness, but much more complicated)
Point 2: Most 55w HID ballasts are not true 55w draw. Many of them measure around 42w stable draw. On startup an HID ballast will pull enough to trigger the headlights to rise, but once stable (about 8-10 seconds later), the power requirements drops to a point too low to trigger the headlights to retract when turned off.
ACA knock-off Headlights
