my DRL's are done..... (there will be pics!)

[britlude]

My DRL story... ('daylight running lights'... for the search engine as DRL is too short!)

Jumping on the bandwagon, I’ve wanted to integrate some DRL’s onto my car, mainly because it’s my car and I can, but just lately there has been an increase in people seemingly not seeing my car, so anything to help!

I’ve seen various threads on various sites, and to be quite honest they look a bit ‘add’-on’. So taking advantage of the indicator/side light units on the pre-facelift front I started looking for stuff! Donor lamp units, so I can return it all to stock easily if need be, and something to use as the DRL’s themselves.


I wanted to go DRL, but keep the indicator facility as well, as is required over here. The US ones I’ve seen delete the indicators completely, or use a flashing DRL for the indicator function. That’s all very well on a ‘50’s Austin, but no good for a UK NSX.

I sourced some donor lamp units, one from this site, the other dragged from the bottom of a pond and sent over from the U.S of A…



yes, it is covered in ginger rust on the inside of the lens....

Then lamps lenses were split from their bases, easy on the pond-life one, a total pain on the british one. Referring to the NSXprime threads, it’s implied they are glued together, and a good dunking in hot water will soften the glue to split them. However, I found no glue, but what looks more like the parts were ultrasonically bonded… that is, they were held together, then ultrasonics (micro vibrations) applied, which caused the interface between the bits to ‘shuffle’ melting the plastics together. So the pond life one fell apart (long term dunking obviously does something!), the british one had to be cut apart with a thin dremmel blade. Just as well I got very used ones! the pond-life lense cleaned up beautifully (apart from the crack!) and interestingly pretty much all the chrome plating on the reflector had disappeared!


On the DRL front, pretty soon into my search I found these, cheap on ebay, with integral indicators, so worth a look….



…9 DRL lamps, surrounded by 16 amber LEDs… all sounds good and the internet pics look ok, but we all know they sometimes don’t look right on the computer.

In the flesh (or plastic) the white lights are good, nice and bright, with integral lenses, but the indicators are very poor, ok as a gimmick, and probably ok at night, but no good in the daylight. The other problem is that of the lights position on the car, the front indicators/sides are at quite an angle to the front of the car, and this will mean the DRLs will point out sideways, not forwards as they should. So back to square one, but it has shown me ‘superflux’ LEDs! It was a shame they were no good, as once trimmed, they fitted in the housing quite nicely.

ho hum, to be continued....