The Lotus Grand Tourers

thought as much

Steve,

Sorry but I have another couple of questions.

With the main beam issue in your opinion would that pass an MOT? Also which colour temperature did you choose?

I have to say I particularly enjoyed the comment on the listing saying that it is plug and play and can be fitted in 40 Min!!!

by the way have you replaced your bonnet strut yet? you can get a Range Rover one from Paddockspares for a fiver, the bonnet practically lifts itself.

are you coming along on Sunday Jon?

I don't think the MOT cares about main beam as long as the dipped cutoff is ok .. I may pop to my friendly MOT place to set up the dipped beam if I get a chance.

40 mins plug and play? Well, if you have a metal body and can ground the loom easily and a decent quality 12v feed (ie. battery) is within reach of the supplied loom, and if you didn't need to drill out an re-rivet half of the headlamp mountings in the pods / body ... and if you couldn't be bothered to keep the wiring tidy, make sure it didn't catch on the headlamp motors etc ...

Realitically, probably more like a 3/4 hour job but I was doing other bits and pieces at the time ..

My bulbs were 6000k ..

Some of the non-h4 kits are easier to fit and just plug into existing wiring, the trouble with the H4 kit is that the live switches from one pin to the other on the bulb, hence the ignitors don't have a constant supply with the H4 kit. This is why they supply a relay and wiring loom for the Bi-xenon kit.

http://www.motuk.co.uk/manual/contents.htm

Section 1.6 contains all you need to know about headlamp aim and the MOT.

The rest of the manual is bl**dy useful too!

Thanks for the information Steve

Martin, I would really like to come along on Sunday but sadly I have to go to Sheffield to the in laws. I understand the weather up there is going to be really bad as well.

Still at least I have got Monday off..

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/LOTUS-EXCEL-82-92 ... dZViewItem

Are these lights any good? My head lights are really poor.

Cheers,

Phil

SteveC said he tried them and they were useless

Those bulbs that claim to "look like HID" or quote some colour in kelvin in an attempt to make you think they're good are far from it.

If you want a legal upgrade the £10-£15 upgrade option is OK and does work to some extent. Get some good quality Philips bulbs that are X-Treme, or one of the other ones they do , alternatively (the £10 region) Ring do some similar idea. They are standard 60w/ 55w H4 lamps, but they're designed to give more light. I guess it's al down to the nature of the materials and quality of the engineering.

I put a pair of new reflectors (I used 7" bowls and standard ones, not the Lotus ones), and a pair of high output 60 55s, they're not HId light output, but better then standard 7" with H4s .

Andy has a good point - by now it's likely that most Excels are suffering from corroded reflectors - replacing them makes a huge difference and some decent H4s (e.g. Halfrauds 2 for 1 superbrights) improves things even further for not much cost/hassle (I speak from experience - my original reflectors were a lovely FeO2 colour over about 50% of the their surface)

I've got the Halfrauds superbrights - quite good.

I'll be very interested to know if these are OK or if there is another way to upgrade the headlights - I've just bought an 87 SE and the headlights are about as much use as a pair of candles !!

Brian 87 SE in "Claret" (in Lotus speak) - that's dark red to ordinary folk.

quote="Steve C"]I've just received an HID Bi-xenon conversion kit ... testing on the bench (well, kitchen table), the difference between that and a standard 55/60 H4 bulb was amazing! It uses the same HID bulb for dipped and main beam by moving the bulb within the holder so that the bulb is not covered by the shield on main beam. if you take a look at a standard H4 bulb you'll see what I mean by the placement of the two filaments. Current draw for one HID ballast/bulb was around 2.8 amps, compared to 5 amps for a 55/60 on main and 8.3 amps for a 80/100 on main beam. In theory the HID kit kicks out around 3 times as much light as a 55/60. So more light, less heat and 11amps less load on the alternator ...

I'll write up the installation, take some pictures and compare with standard 55w/60w and the 80w/100w "xenon" filled standard filament bulbs that I currently have fitted.

Price including express delivery was just £73 .. BARGAIN![/quote]

How are the new lights doing, any better than the original halogens ?

John

The difference is quite simply amazing!!

They are so bright I felt the need to run the dipped beam quite high to make the most of it but that meant the main beam was in the sky!

Lowering the aim of the dipped beam now means that main beam is good, although at a slight compromise to dipped beam.

I will write an article soon ...

I seem to remember a post on SELOC on the subject of HID conversions stating that along with all the other B.S regulations for running HIDs you are required to have remote headlamp wash.

Not impossible/too difficult to achieve on an Excel but I thought I'd just mention it.