That single seater needs a pair if genie Lucas Flamethrowers, mounted down low. You can get them two ways if you look, either the standard 7" high/low beam or you can get them in the smaller size for quad lights and only have a single selection. If you scrounge around ( you already are if you are looking for lucas lights) you can find '30s era aux lights that would house the baby lights. Just an option to think about. Interesting thought if you buy a modern halogen sealed beam it has a halogen bulb inside the sealed beam. Somewhat resembling the early lights only all glass so in essence on sealed beams they have come full circle as well. On a modern car, or a modern build you have lots of options, sealed beams, H-4s, projector beams, pretty much whatever your little ol heart desires. The nicest thing about a modern light is the advancements that have been made in optics. With good reflectors and lenses you really don't need as much light to see the road. Less light less current draw and less heat. I'll give Rick a shot. I like my lights ( can be seen in @Tim 's post) and could run them as is but the tags would just add cool factor for me. My lights actually had flat lens Hellas in them when I got them. They just didn't look right. I got a line on Lucas Flame throwers now or I may go with curved lens Cibis. Dependent on funds, but probably they will just get standard seal beams. LOL One thing that I will not run is those dumb ass tri bars that are available at about any street rod shop. If I can't find real deal vintage tri bars I will just run seal beams. In my mind those modern tri bar lights are as bad as square lights. I am having a hard time finding a good example but on the right car I like the old housings with the seal beam conversion like this old sedan.
You know come to think about it my Pops has a set of small aux. lights hanging on the wall that would probably work .
I'm with Dana Barlow on this one, don't like the big headlights at all, I find them really distracting, they disrupt the flow of the lines, especially on a fenderless rod. I like King Bees, down low.
My preference is small but not to small. When I got this it had commercial 34 head lights I was told. IMHO the most important issue is not so much the size, but where they are placed in proportion to the grill and the car. I really question putting them way down below center line or way above center line. But then to each his/her own. I do not like this shot of the car but it shows where this amateur builber put his.
That's been the point I've been trying get across. While lamp wattage is important to a degree, unless the lens/reflector is designed for the particular lamp you're using, how well the light output is utilized can be problematic. Lens material is more critical than you think; not all lenses transmit light the same. Where the optical-quality glass lenses on a 'premium' light like a Cibie can transmit up to 98% of the light put through them, lesser lenses can rob up to 10% of your output. That light doesn't just 'disappear' either; it's converted to 'scatter', and that's what irritates and/or blinds oncoming drivers. Installing a larger wattage lamp to overcome poor optics simply makes this worse. This is why 'conversions' for older light assemblies are uniformly illegal pretty much everywhere, although enforcement in the US is spotty at best. To my knowledge, the DOT has never approved ANY headlight conversion for US use, although some will claim that their kits uses 'DOT approved components' which isn't the same thing at all. I bought my first pair of Cibie lights in late '71. These were 7" round units for my daily driver. At the time, these were illegal and a lot of users were getting busted for running them. Now, the interesting part of this is the ones getting caught were using halogen lamp versions; the different 'color' of the halogen was easily spotted by the LEOs. I went another way; Cibie at the time offered a 'Euro-spec' light that used a conventional incandescent lamp that had the same color spectrum as DOT lamps, with very nearly if not the same performance as the 'whiter' halogens. I never got stopped, even once. I moved these light from car to car (if what I had used the 7" round) until the early '90s when the lamp finally became discontinued when I threw them away. I should have kept them, as there is now a halogen lamp available for them... oh well. And for those who think that HID or LED is now the 'best' choice, be aware that the color spectrum on these is much narrower than incandescent lamps (and this includes halogen, which is simply a 'hotter' version of the same thing). Our eyes are evolved to 'recognize' wide-spectrum sunlight, and using a narrow-spectrum light source can cause 'confusion' when viewing things. Of all the lighting choices out there, incandescent lamps still offers the closest match to natural sunlight. My current daily has HID lights, and the color rendition is nowhere near as good as halogen lights.
Old pic prior to disassembly. I used 34 passenger car lights and hung them so the tops of the lights were about even with the tops of the tires. I don't like them any higher, but I have see a few that look nice mounted lower.
I think that you and I have actually chatted about HIDs before. I don't think that they lasted very long in the world of going fast. Actually while it would be fun to expand my horizons I am still happy enough with my world being just what exists in that little yellow pool.
The Jalopy Journal
