Lighter lights

For Christmas Santa brought me a set of polycarbonate headlights and bowls.

I’d been meaning to buy and fit a pair of these for a while, the Spitfire still has it’s original (!) sealed beam RHD units.  As far as I know they’re the ones that came with the car – they’ve certainly both got overspray on them from when the car was painted red by a previous owner and that’s the colour it was when I got it in the late ’90s.

The motivation for fitting polycarbonate lights was to save weight and convert the car to being able to drive on the right hand side of the road (although for racing this doesn’t really matter).  Another nice side effect is that I can just use standard H4 bulbs instead of worrying what to do if a sealed bean unit suddenly packs up.

So.. Just how much lighter are polycarbonate lights?

Here is an original headlight and metal bowl on the sophisticated weighing setup I have in the garage.

Original Lucas sealed beam headlight and fittings on the scales

1010 grams! So, just over a kilogram.  And, here are the new polycarbonate light and fittings.

Wipac polycarbonate light and fittings on the scales

742 grams.. I was actually expecting them to be much lighter, but it goes to show how light the original lamps actually are, still as I’m replacing both lamps it’s a saving of just over half a kilogram overall, which isn’t too bad.

Fitting them also gave me the opportunity to finally sort out the headlight wiring and replace all the old and nasty bullet connecters with decent ones.

I tend to use Superseal connectors for this kind of job, they’re cheap, reliable and easy to fit.

Superseal connectors

And proof that it all works!

Wipac polycarbonate lights on the Spitfire