ARB DRL MOD
Johnny Lange
I made a little altercation to the ARB bumper of the weekend. I had thought about this and some other lighting ideas for a few months. This could easily be made for a smaller strip of LED off road light as well.
DRL = Daytime running lights. All the new cool cars (Audi, Porsche, BMW, etc) have em now so I thought what the heck. Of course, in doing some research on the actual DRL’s, I found a ton out there but the Phillips brand (Model: DRL8, $150-$170) appeared to be the units I wanted as they gave the most light and offer a dim display feature that can be hooked up to your parking lights for nighttime use. The package touts all the safety features of running DRLs; less accidents, enhanced visibility (to other drivers), etc. That’s all great and dandy, but I just think they look cool and let’s face it, LED lighting is the wave. I guess if someone sees me coming down the road and it prevents an accident, then wonderful.
After having these lights in for two days now, these units are really bright, it's amazing. A friend commented I could "almost" use them as headlights at night. Overall, I am impressed with the quality and brightness of them and would recommend them. *In some of the pics below (certain angles), they do not look as bright, but they are. The shot with the headlights on depicts their brightness and is most accurate.
I am not sure if anyone else with the ARB bumper on their 80 used the turn signals in the bumper, I never did. They were duds. I found the larger OEM turn signal under the headlight worked fine. Since I didn’t use the ARB signals, I used this area for the DRL’s. I removed the ARB turn signals and taped up my cut line. Some moments later, my opening was a few inches longer (towards the center). After test fitting the new homemade DRL housing, I smoothed things up and made things pretty and painted the cuts the on the bumper for rust protection.
I essentially I made a bracket out of some strip metal and welded it all together. I then made and welded a light mounting tab to the back of it. After smoothing it up a bit, I painted it in a Semi-Gloss black to match the ARB’s powdercoat finish. By the way, "Rustoleum Professional series" does this well – Home Depot, $4 a can.
The hardware is all stainless steel (allen head) via Home Depot. I used two larger bolts on the ends, and four smaller bolts on the top and bottom. The four upper and lower are not really needed, but I felt they added a little “look” to the bracket and they are now Zombie proof.
The wiring schematic on the lights suggests hooking up the lights to your battery (switched power supply that is), but I ended up adding a switch to turn them off if I ever needed to. Otherwise they are on when the car is on.
Now I am happy and my 80-Series kinda looks like a spaceship coming down the road. I think it's updated things a bit.
Give me your thoughts. I have some ideas for version II as well.
*The LED DRL lights below show a certain greenish hue to them, this is actually NOT the case and is just caused by the photography. They are a true white-bright light tone like my HID lights (4300K) for the record.
