Aston Martin DB7 Headlight Upgrade, the Aston Martin DB7 headlights are now a fairly old design. The outer lamp, the dipped beam is a 2.5″ projector with a halogen H1 bulb, and the inner light which does full beam is a convention reflector design with a halogen H1 bulb.
The main beam gives out a reasonable amount of light but the dipped beam has a very poor output
LED Bulb upgrades
One common method of upgrading is to use LED bulbs and this can give a small improvement, one being the light temperature is much closer to daylight at around 6000K compared to 4300K for halogen but there are issues;
It is currently illegal to install LED bulbs into headlight units designed for HID or Halogen bulbs.
An LED chip can only give off limited power before it overheats and degrades, that’s why large LED lights use multiple LED chips, but headlights are designed for point source bulbs and if you use multiple chips they wont be in the correct position to give the proper beam pattern, meaning a very poor beam pattern and dazzling of other road users. (H1 light source is 4.5*1.4*1.4mm)
Bi-LED DB7 Headlight Upgrade
I decided to do away with the dipped beam light unit altogether and replace it with a modern state of the art Bi-LED projector.
To do this meant building a completely new housing, however I wanted it to look stock and fit into the larger headlight housing
I used a 65W Bi-LED with 12 Low beam LED chips and an additional 6 LED chips for high beam.
This was then fitted into a front housing designed to look stock and use the existing front glass lens
The Bi-LED dipped beam (unfortunately the first projector that came to hand was LHD) gave 490 Lumens at 10 metres, 7 times as bright as the stock projector as well as a much smoother wider beam.
