Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Maintenance & Servicing Headlights-bulb type to sealed beam conversion

AAGH, am I driving an antique? I liked it when it was a classic.

The Candlepower folks might be the answer. I'll look into that. Thanks.

Am I correct in thinking that modern headlights are in fact semi sealed beam units? In other words glass and reflector are a unit and the bulbs are replaceable.

Correct.

+2
In the mid 80s my (first) job was working in a automotive lighting design team.
At that time Europe had mainly adopted bulbs in their headlamps and U.S. was still using sealed beams. The issue with replaceable bulbs is that they can move and when the filament is off the focus point of the reflector the headlamp can lose power and/or produce hot spots which can dazzle an oncoming driver. Also the initial quality of bulbs was not always as high as could have been hoped for - if we got a 'perfect' bulb we kept it on one side to use in the lamps sent for homologation testing!
The sealed beam keeps the fixed filament in one place.
U.S. at the time insisted on the consistent quality of fixed filaments.
The downside of sealed beams was the cost of replacement and the failure of sealed beam output to keep up with bulbs.
Another factor - maybe the most important in America changing - was that sealed beams tended to be limited in shapes and bulbed lamps gave more scope in lamp dimensions. For example - in the UK depth of lamp became very important on vehicles such as the Metro and the bulbed lamps allowed advances in reflector design to cope with this.
American opened up the market in the mid eighties to allow replaceable bulbs - I assume this is still the case.
In the past thirty years bulb design has continued to advance and improvements in build quality has helped the stability of filament location. So I doubt there would be any need to move back to sealed beams.

An interesting insight into the history of automotive lights. Thanks Adrian.

I was looking at fitting LED based replacements for the standard lights, like this one:


LED

Until I realised they are sealed units and if the LED or the electronics that drive it die then it is "replace the unit": only £364 EACH!!!!!!

So I'll wait until they are cheaper.

Though, the whole point of LEDs is that they have a far longer life than filament bulbs, as they are far more vibration proof, amongst other things.

The manufacturer quotes greater than 30,000 hours life.
http://www.taiwantrade.com.tw/EP/giantlight/products-detail/en_US/700170/7%22_Bi-LED_Headlamp/

What frustrates me is the lack of a simple mechanism to electronically switch these lights to continental use.

At 4 hours a day that is only 20 years...!

My BMW has HID lights. For "European mainland" use there is a software setting in the car setup menu that changes how the lights dip. No idea how it works, but it does seem to work.