Lighting for roof rack
 

So, I just picked up an SD rack for my D2 and I'm looking at lights for the front. I'm thinking some Hellas in keeping with the old school look. What are you running on yours?
Post up some pics so we can see.

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/landrov...880bb38694.jpg

LED Light Bar. Love the thing. I've used it extensively after dark on dirt roads. The only problem with mounting it high is it lights up the potholes so well it's hard to tell how deep they are while you're approaching them.

I run a 40" LED as well.....Doesn't get any better unless it's high noon.

I run a 50" single LED bar on the rack and a smaller one on the front bar. Front is relay with the high beams and rack is switched on the dash. Can't imagine needing more light.

I have been trying to make the same decision but will probably go with the 50" bar on the LR3

I'm undecided between 4-6 inch round Hellas and a double row light bar for my SD rack.

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/landrov...001b10492.jpeg


I am running the original equipment on the bumper and PIAA on the rack. May switch back to OE on the rack if I can find replacements at reasonable cost.

Go with the led light bar.
They are very, very bright.
A friend of mine has a 9" light bar on the handlebars of his Raptor 700.
Trail riding, if you are in front or behind him, you can turn your lights off, as you literally don't need them...and that's a 9" light bar!
My friend's have bigger ones on their trucks as well.
Better than their high beam head lights.

They just make glare that reflects back into your eyes and makes it harder to see everything not lit up and then you need them brighter. It's insidious. Less is more.
The headlights are already engineered for an acceptable beam pattern that won't often blind other drivers on road. You could add very narrow beams for high speed driving on empty highways, but it would be anti-thematic to older Land Rovers with oversize tires which it would be ill-advised to drive at over 80 mph. Offroad, older Land Rovers are also not like trophy trucks or desert racers. On slow trails, a very low level of luminosity with a wide flood beam is going to illuminate the area immediately around the vehicle without creating so much glare that the driver is blinded to more distant points of reference.
LED's are typically narrow-beam and most often not able to be dimmed. They also tend to emit shorter wavelength light that is worse for glare.
I know my ideas don't sell imported truck accessories, but tell me any other error I've made.

So this thread isnt too old to comment on :)

I have to agree - I've used LED in the garage, fluorescent, halogen etc and have always wondered why you'd ever put an LED on a car/truck.
I need throw and width from my truck lights. Or so I'd assume as I'm still shopping for my D2 but....
When I see these light bars on-coming, its f'cking annoying."Bright" as hell but that seems to be it.
I want to be able to see far and wide not bright and close up.

Round HID, halogen etc seem to much more fit the idea of the sort of light I'd want on a trail, in the dark woods etc.......

Am I wrong about all of this?
Have one of you used both side by side?

I also dont want LED light bars because every freaking redneck with a truck has one.

Rounds just have a style I'd more associate with a Discovery than a bar but thats just me.......

There's no question that vehicle lighting is faddish. The last time I was in San Francisco, even the cable-cars had LED headlights. It's like a hideous desecration. Ok, understandably they must run on batteries since there's no engine to drive a generator and no electricity from the cable. So LED technology isn't a bad idea, it's just the round array of 5mm diodes that look like a Light-Brite toy from the 70's was so prolific from 20 years ago that it's badly anachronistic. It's a pity they don't use smaller surface mount devices with a lower color temperature and a reflector. Other historic landmarks like the Old Faithful Lodge at Yellowstone have adopted LED technology in ways that look authentic.

For a 4x4, we want functionality as well as looks. Nowadays, most offroad vehicle accessory lights use some form of surface-mount LEDs and they are very bright, but as mentioned, they tend to be narrow-beam and high color temperature. Maybe someone who uses a wide (40+") lightbar can tell us whether it throws a wide beam or if it focuses most of the light straight ahead. As for looks, and LED bar will probably not look out of place on a Discovery II or later model vehicle with contemporary appearance, but they will be very trendy as noted above. For Disco 1's, Range Rover Classics, and Series, they might be considered anachronistic.

But let's consider that the 80's fad of racks full of KC Daylighters was just as lame. For Land Rovers, too many people adopted the "Camel Trophy" look with two to four bumper-mounted Hellas and another four on the roof rack. This was never a good arrangement for Land Rovers. The Camel Trophy outfitters were decorating the vehicles with eye-candy as much as anything. What the Camel Trophy participants really needed for the majority of their efforts was work lights and not the kind of racks of blinding long-distance beams. For them to be driving rough terrain in the dark at speeds that required seeing that far would have been insane. It wasn't a race. They weren't desert-racing Dakar rally or Baja trophy trucks, but that's what the outfitters copied. It is similarly unlikely that individual Land Rover owners are well-served by night-racing lights. They will be useless on roads with traffic and just create mileage-robbing drag, wind-noise, and [the bumper-mounted ones will] block flow to the radiator, exacerbating cooling problems. On the trail, they'll create blinding hot-spots of glare when they reflect off near-field objects, and diminish the dark-adaptation of the occupants' vision. This effect is the reason instrument panel lights are dimmable. A particular problem of roof-rack mounted lights is when they reflect off the hood. Even a blacked-out hood will create a lot of glare if it's dirty.

If the Camel Trophy "look" is not very functional, it's also of a questionable aesthetic. I remember reading one 4x4 writer's comment that offroad vehicles with many round accessory lights look like spiders with numerous eyes. The LED lightbar offers a more monolithic alternative.

Whether you do it for the aesthetic or the function, do it in a way that isn't stupid. I can tell you that what I see on most accessorized 4x4's that look like they drove through a 4WheelParts store and knocked over the shelves... you'll never see any of that junk on military vehicles like Humvees or the newer MRAPS and JLTV's unless a lame police department put them on there. For their half-million dollar to over-a-million-dolar price-tags, you would think that contractors like AM Gen., Gen. Dyn., Boeing, Lock.Mart., Oshkosh, etc. could have afforded some "bling," if it wasn't just worthless crap.

I have standard halogen headlights on the LR3, LED fogs and HID off road lights. To me being able to see on the trail at night is not a fade.

The LED's flat out perform, and don't load down the electrical system. The haolgen bulb is fine but extra light is welcome in the dark far from civilization. they give a nice wide flood light in front of the truck and the HID take care of the extra distance beam straight out.

Still debating a light bar for the roof rack. My friend has one from Baja designs on his rack and it is like firing up the sun.



https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/landrov...17c15c2c8d.jpg

Seeing on the trail is a good thing. Point is that brighter light doesn't equal better seeing. Often it is the opposite. Our eyes can adjust to see in a very broad range of light, but they cannot see from very bright to very dark at the same time. If you make any one thing bright, you lose sight of everything that is much darker.

Headlights alone will cause your vision to shift. So if your running lights making them worthwhile is better. My added lights add coverage on the sides and greater distance. Unless you are suggesting you run with no lights.

I think we are going to have to agree to disagree, though as I know you won't sway my opinion on auxiliary lighting being necessary.

oh and military vehicles do run LED main lights and aux lights

I agree not to beleaguer the point. But yeah, on the trail it is sometimes better to turn headlights off. It depends on the terrain and your speed. At 15mph, the headlights should be on. At speeds under 10, you might see better without them and using a wider flood lamp with no sharp cutoff. Headlights necessarily have a narrow focus and sharp cutoff to avoid blinding other drivers. Offroad, that results in some areas being very dark, and only a small area having intense light. Most "offroad" lights fashioned after the rally/desert racer style have an even narrower focus and more intense light. The key to seeing well is to only go as much above the ambient luminosity as is absolutely necessary. Kind of like "as slow as possible, as fast as necessary," my rule would be, "As dim as possible, as bright as necessary."

Run no lights? yeah we won't ever agree.

Also a lot of advancement has been made in the led lights and floods are a option that have a very nice wide beam. You should check them out

I've got a set of 4 ARB copy cat 9inch round LED lights mounted on my roof rack of my 99 D2 and they are fantastic. I didn't take my 99 out to the 2018 HCRR event, but I rode with 2 guys that had them as well and off roading at night on the tight trails = a breeze with them on.

So, picking this thread back up as the OP. I picked up a set of 4 Hella 500's for cheap and mounted them up top on my Rack. Yes,"camel throphy-ish" as someone mentioned, but I think its cool and that's all that matters.
On to the wiring. Has anyone pulled the power wires down behind the A-pillar cover with success? Any issues with chafing? What size wire did you use, etc. Post any pics if you have then. I'm getting ready to wire mine up and I'm looking for examples that work.
TIA, eddie

And it's crazy but those fad fog lights in my bumper really came in handy tonight when one of my headlights burned out on the way home. :)

All the roof rack lighting on my 99 D2 for the 4 9inch ARB looking LED's and the Hella rear work light = I ran them down behind the A Pillar Trim. I used 18 gauge wire if I'm not mistaken.

Thanks Best,

Yeah, I did the watt to amps to wire size calculation. Looks like 12 gauge wire is slightly more than I need as it peaks out at 12 amps. The 4 Hella 500's have 55 watt bulbs for a total of 220 watts and will pull 18.3 amps.

I'll wire my rear work light into a separate switch powered from my trailer connector.

As I near completion of the light project I am deciding what to do about my switches. I did the cover plate mod to an extra cruise control switch so that I could utilize the switch blanks on the left side of my dash binnacle. Who's done this and remembers what wires you used. The harness pig tail I got with the switch has 4 wires green, red, yellow w/white tracer, and black.

I can't remember the C/C Switch wiring, but I just used a meter to figure it out. I then tapped into the dash illuimination so it looks 100% factory. For my rear Hella Work Lamp I just ran it straight off the battery with a fuse. The Hella Work Lamp has a built in on/off switch so I didn't see any reason to go nuts for that. I also slapped an H3 LED bulb into it vs the standard 55watt bulb it came with. I then ran the wiring up the opposite A Pillar, and zip tied the wiring (which I put in a small heatshrink jacket I found at Altex Electronics for like 2.00 each for a 3ft piece) along the inside of the upper roof rack bar.

When it comes to wiring I'm all about hiding it as best as possible, and doing it the best that can be done to where it's better than a factory harness.

With all this time off 'cause of the pandemic, I finally got around to making a lightbar. I had these lights lying around for a while and found some old Yakima roof rack towers. Got some 1 in pipe to fit the tower clamps and welded on tabs. installed a LED light bar on the rear of the roof rack while I was at it. Relays are under the bonnet and installed the switches in the overhead panel. I like the round lights for the vintage look. Wired the rear light bar (through a relay) to a 3 position switch. Off or On or automatically on with the reverse lights.
https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/landrov...2171096cf4.jpg
Yakima towers
https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/landrov...029ce0991e.jpg
old style round lights look cool
https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/landrov...6ef6fbc3fd.jpg
welded on tabs
https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/landrov...29630d5fbc.jpg
rear light. LED is ok back here.
https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/landrov...1efd61b98e.jpg
switches in overhead. ditch lights are the left and right ones