I have LED bulbs, front and back in my John Deere garden tractor and they are great. In fact the headlights even wig wag.

My tractor is only two wheel drive however and does not have a terrain control **** - but I do have a voltmeter and oil pressure gauge.

I figure the MR2 does not have the terrain **** but might have a voltmeter and an oil pressure gauge. The 3's systems were not designed to interact with LED bulbs, the 4 is - sort of.

My 1996 John Deere has no computers, so nothing is bothered by the LEDs - in fact they are welcomed, as the alternator only makes 20 amps.

The tractor also has a 5 VDC USB power socket for charging cell phones and the like, plus a 12VDC power plug.

 

I've been looking more into the bulbs and found the direct replacement bulbs are rubbish anyways. I didn't realize they don't really light up very much brighter when the breaks are depressed. Would running led driving lights be a problem if they are wired to just the 12v?

 

I presume you want to mount a LED light bar in the grill. As long as you power it sort of independently of any of the computer systems, there will be no problem. The best way to isolate the LEDs is to power them thru a relay.

Your biggest problem will be to get a conductor thru the firewall and locating a switch; then consider having the switch operate a relay and the relay mounted in the engine compartment to power the LEDs.

Below is a good link re hooking up driving lights thru a relay, official Land Rover style.

Overland Journal Project Land Rover Discovery 4 (LR4) - Page 5 - Expedition Portal

 

I setup 3 lights on separate relays. I have a 4 button tiny remote, and you can switch each light individually. 2 are 10 amp relays for the rear lights, and 1 30amp for the light bar. It works very slick... I was able to remove about 12ft of wiring and all those pesky switches. Let me know if you need details, drop me a PM etc. I think I spent about 100 bucks for 2 10 and 2 30a relays..

What differs from the LR expo setup, is they are remote relays, so no wire needed to be run for switches, no pesky figure out where to put the switch problems, etc.

 

I have a 90s wheelhorse, never liked the output of my front lights. Are the LEDs much brighter vs stock? which ones did you get?

 

Here's the low beams, don't have a good picture of the high beams at the moment.

Thanks for the advice bbyer

 

Yes, the LEDs that I installed are brighter than the stock 1156 single filament tungsten bulbs that John Deere uses for bulbs in my tractors "headlights".

As to if one can see more, that is difficult to say. What is certain is that the tractor is easier to see, at least from head on and that has some merit around the airstrip where I have the tractor based. I also put the headlights on a Wig Wag circuit for use as recognition lights.

Plowing snow in the dark is not my idea of fun so the headlights will not get much use in the winter and in the month of summer, well the sun does not really set for very long up here.

The headlights on my 425 have a silvered plastic reflective lens surface within that is supposed to focus the light from the tungsten filament. As to if the surface and shape focus the light from the LED, that is hard to say. The fact that they look bright when you look into them suggests some sort of focus action is going on however. Then there is the question of aiming. Yes, JD does have a sort of lamp aiming ability as well but that is not common on most garden tractors.

The bulbs that are shown in the first jpg below are off eBay and have a greater K colour number than I would prefer, hence there is also the question of definition - that is the ability of the eye to recognize what is illuminated.

I prefer a 4300K colour similar to our xenon HID projector headlights over the nearer 6000K colour that tends to be common in cheap LEDs such as I purchased.

The third jpg below shows the stock 1156 tungsten bulb on the right, (above the liquid cooled badge), and the LED on the left, above the Anderson plug for the winch.

You may also beable to see a difference in the colour of the light emitted. The middle jpg is with LEDs in both.

 

Thanks for the pic! My wife and I are heading back to Chattanooga, TN from Seattle, WA on Thursday. We just acquired a 2003 Disco with 100k on the clock with the original owner and all documentation of work! So once we get both Rovers back to TN, going to finish blacking out my headlights and adding Halos and LED's!

 

Swapped out noisy rear diff with used one I had hop its good , no leaks and oil was clean in the replacement so shot in the dark

back rear swap is not bad

 

So I finally got to start working on the 3 last night.

When I bought it the battery try was ripped out and disassembled. So I took the lid off the air line plumbing box to get an idea of how everything was supposed to go. Thankfully the dealer I bought it from was good about keeping all the nuts and screws to put back. I undid the bonnet shocks ( I need new ones) and pushed the bonnet all the way open with two old wooden garden poles. They are holding nicely.

I had the 3 at an indie shop, big mistake, and they returned it with the upper fan shroud off and the fan off too. The t-stat housing was off and the intake including the filter needed to be put back. So I put in the t-stat housing and put on the intake. def. need a new filter. WOW. Very dirty Batman.

Anyway it was a good putzing session in the garage. I need a fan spanner wrench to connect the fan and I am on the hunt for some other regular maintenance items too.

Oh and the cherry on top of my session was a battery install. And seeing how they just tell you to disconnect the ground on all the workshop details, now I know why. There is a bracket holding it down etc. etc.

My Walmart MAXX-H7 battery has already crapped out. The indie drained it while in for service and I don't think it ever recovered. To be truthful, I thinkI got what I paid for. I will be returning it today and looking for a much stronger one. I was never fully convinced about its cranking power from the get go. The one I bought for the 7.3 powerstroke lacked umf too.

I think they are just bad batteries.