[Musclestang4.0]

I've been driving at night quite a bit since I've gotten my stang. One of the first things I got was the tinted headlight housing from American Muscle. It barely dimmed my headlights at all when I first installed it, so I know that isn't the reason. The headlight brightness has been gradually dwindling and I'm wondering what might be causing it. I installed a new HID conversion kit to fix the problem a few months back, but it didn't help at all...

 

[Musclestang4.0]

I've been driving at night quite a bit since I've gotten my stang. One of the first things I got was the tinted headlight housing from American Muscle. It barely dimmed my headlights at all when I first installed it, so I know that isn't the reason. The headlight brightness has been gradually dwindling and I'm wondering what might be causing it. I installed a new HID conversion kit to fix the problem a few months back, but it didn't help at all...

Also installed a new battery a few weeks ago.

 

[Yadkin]

Need more details about the "HID" kit that you installed. A true HID lamp is a xenon arc (no filament) bulb that requires an electronic ballast. These are accompanied by a hemispherical glass lens that projects the beam down road.

 

[JBert]

tinted housing definitely does not help, it's like shining a flashlight through sunglasses

for slow deterioration I would suspect fogging of the "lens" cover, maybe polish it?

or maybe the HID conversion is the issue

 

[hobojack]

A bad ground will do it all the time

 

[JBert]

good point about the ground, makes me think of the wiring . . . there are some old posts floating around, on this board I think, where the guys replaced the factory headlight wiring harness with a heavier one, and they got noticeably better output from the original headlights as a result

I'm pretty sure the HID's draw more juice than the original halogens, so the wiring becomes even more important; and maybe a connection has been deteriorating and causing the degradation of light output . . . which makes me think, the OP should check that pretty quick, if a connection has high resistance it can get so hot as to melt or even catch on fire in extreme cases

 

[Musclestang4.0]

good point about the ground, makes me think of the wiring . . . there are some old posts floating around, on this board I think, where the guys replaced the factory headlight wiring harness with a heavier one, and they got noticeably better output from the original headlights as a result

I'm pretty sure the HID's draw more juice than the original halogens, so the wiring becomes even more important; and maybe a connection has been deteriorating and causing the degradation of light output . . . which makes me think, the OP should check that pretty quick, if a connection has high resistance it can get so hot as to melt or even catch on fire in extreme cases

The HID kit came with a new wiring harness but i never got around to installing that. I'm still using the old harness cuz I figured it would do the same job...

 

[JBert]

The HID kit came with a new wiring harness but i never got around to installing that. . . .

sounds like it might be time