Hi/lo beams

You have no *genuine* bulb upgrade options. Sylvania will sell you their reduced-life, reduced-output, increased-glare, increased-price Silverstar bulbs (yippee...), but because the US-market PT Cruiser headlamp uses the straight-base variant of the 9005 high beam and 9006 low beam bulbs, you're kind of stuck choosing between phony "upgrades" with blue glass (Silverstar and various others) or standard replacement bulbs. I agree with you, the US-market PT Cruiser's headlamps leave a fair amount to be desired. The low beams are amongst the "least worst" of the recent Chrysler offerings, but they're not great and the high beams might as well not exist for all the good they do.

The rest-of-world PT Cruiser got better lamps with more efficient, higher-output H7 bulbs. Those lamps go by on ebay.de from time to time, or can be sourced new if you make contact with an overseas Chrysler dealer and order one 5288767AI and one 5288766AH. You'd almost certainly also need two 5288 904AB headlamp levelling motors in order to be able to adjust the aim of the export lamps, but it's possible the US-market manual adjusting screw assembly would pop in place where the motorised one is intended to go -- I'm not sure on that one.

Easier, less costly and more effective to buy and install the Morette headlamp kit for the PT, *if* you can stomach the appearance (some love it, some hate it):

me an e-mail, dastern (at) torque (dot) net if you are havingtrouble finding the Morette kit in North America.)

Hmmm...it oddly makes the PT look like a....1961 Newport! It HAS to be better than USA stock, though. The 300 headlamps are equally bad, but I only saw them on a test drive. I did feel like I was "flying blind" with low beams, however, with two little white hot spots dancing on the asphalt ahead..

Hmmm. I have a pretty direct line to product news out of Sylvania, and I keep a sharp eye out for new or modified product lines, but I haven't seen any segmented-reflector sealed beam headlamps out of Sylvania or any of the other makers. Your M-body would take H4656 high/low and H4651 high-beam units, and as far as I'm aware, the only Silverstar beams in those sizes are the parabolic-reflector, lens-optic type. Show us a picture or weblink to what you bought and let's see what it is. (Even if Sylvania suddenly saw the light and produced an optically-accurate reflector-optic range of sealed beams, if they are sold under the Silverstar name, they have that light-stealing, glare-increasing, life-cutting blue glass coating, which is a silly marketeering gimmick that makes the lamp a nonstarter as far as meaningful seeing performance improvement goes).

And short seeing distance, owing to Chrysler's insistence on cheap headlamps using VOR low beam patterns instead of putting more money into good optics and specifying VOL low beam cutoffs. The VOR is the type with a cutoff at the top of the right side of the low beam (it's allowed to extend horizontally over to the left, too, but it has to be present at the top of the right side). This is basically a straight-across cutoff, fog lamp style, aimed at the horizon. You can get decent width, but in-lane beam reach is often poor because there's very little light above horizontal even on the side of the beam facing away from traffic.

VOL, the other visually-aimed low beam pattern allowed in the US, is conceptually similar to the rest-of-world European ECE low beam: the cutoff extends leftward from the top-center of the low beam, and is aimed slightly below the horizon. To the right of center, the cutoff either dissolves, steps upward, or sweeps upward at an angle. This means in-lane seeing distance can be longer with thoughtful optical design, because the upstep/upsweep throws light well down the right side of your own lane. Europe has used low beams like this since 1952 without a problem (England since '73, Australia since '71, Japan since '90...). But when Chrysler put VOL headlamps on the Pacifica, lazy dealers were refusing to educate customers who thought they were seeing the left light aimed lower than the right light (they were actually seeing the stair-step cutoff produced by BOTH lights). Rather than put a paragraph and diagram in the owner's manual or put out a service bulletin, Chrysler bitched to lampmakers that VOL low beams were costing them too much money in warranty headlamp re-aims and started specifying VORs for almost all their headlamps.

I'm still keenly interested to see what it is you have there.

Well, filtered towards the blue (not the green) by coating the bulb glass blue. This suppresses the yellow light which is most effective at making the human visual system work, but allows the marketeers to babble about "closer to natural sunlight" and "the look of expensive HID" and blahbitty blah blah blah.

I believe it. Though, to be perfectly fair, sealed beam headlamps in general aren't very precise optical instruments under the best of conditions, and most of them are poorly made on old tooling nowtimes. For anyone who cares, here is a report I wrote up after doing some dissective analysis of various sealed beams a couple years ago:

This is a report of the results of disassembly and analysis of several different 200mm x 142mm (2B1) rectangular sealed beams.

GE has recently released a new line ("Nighthawk") of high performance bulbs and sealed beams. Their beam formation is certainly better in several respects than other sealed beams: Overall focus is definitely better, the hot spot is reasonably well shaped and placed and is intense, and the beam is considerably wider. There is no efficacy-reducing blue glass in the lens, reflector or burner envelope (such blue glass is found in e.g. Sylvania Silverstar and Wagner TruView).

Foreground light is still rather lacking with the NightHawk, but the bigger inadequacy is that a mask is not used during aluminization, so the optically useless floor and ceiling of the lamp are covered with shiny stuff, same as the parabolic reflector. Therefore, light from the filaments hits the floor and ceiling and is emitted from the headlamp as optically uncontrolled upward stray light, which causes glare and backdazzle in bad weather.

In the 1970s when the idea of rectangular sealed beam headlamps was being discussed as a possibility, there was scarcely any objection to this big increase in stray light which does not exist with round lamps that have no floors and ceilings. The only concerns voiced were to do with marketing and interchangeability. This is probably because halogen sealed beams were still far in the future at the time, and it is much easier to put an effective filament shield (rain cap, fog cap) on filaments that are not enclosed in a halogen capsule. The tungsten sealed beams had beam patterns with a great deal of uplight, but very little vertical stray light, because the filament shielding was good. Halogen sealed beams all rely on the poor shielding job done by the blacktop at the forward end of the burner. Not that an effective bulb shield *couldn't* be incorporated into a halogen sealed beam -- it's been done in European-spec sealed beams in the past, and Koito made some DOT H6052s with bulb shields for Mitsubishi in the mid-

1980s -- but nobody does so in current-production sealed beams.

One of the goals of this experiment was to mask the floor, ceiling and other optically-useless and distorted areas to observe the effect on glare and backdazzle.

The lenses were removed from the reflectors of a GE standard 6052, a GE NightHawk H6054NH and a Sylvania XtraVision H6054XV.

NB- GE stopped making nonhalogen sealed beam headlamps some time back; everything uses a halogen burner now, even the ones in "standard tungsten" boxes. These lamps now use twin-transverse-filament halogen burners with the wattage and flux adjusted to approximate the characteristics of the previous nonhalogen assemblies. As is the case with most halogen sealed beams, beam focus and stray light are worse than tungsten non-halogen beam units, and they suffer from all the problems endemic to most US sealed beam headlamps: Poor beam focus with excessive uplight and upward stray light.

The unlensed beam of the 6052 is a very poorly focused diagonal(!) oblong of "blotchy" light (gradients/streaks within the oblong). There's just no way to get anything even remotely approaching a well-defined beam pattern out of this. The best one can do is use the lens optics to shift enough light away from the upward-leftward area to comply minimally with the glare maxima. Heel distortion in the reflector was evident and can't have been helping any, either. Then add in the aforementioned floor and ceiling reflections *plus* light escaping the burner and travelling directly through the lens, and the resultant beam pattern is a sick joke.

Next, the Night Hawk H6054NH. I applied power and examined the unlensed beam. These lamps use a burner with C8/C8 twin axial filaments -- essentially an HB5 burner of 65/55w, emitting an estimated 1400/1100 lumens high/low beam. The unlensed beam itself was very impressive: a tight, centrally-focused round spot of light with moderate "fingers" upwards and downwards. Not so impressive was the amount of stray light coming primarily from the reflectorized floor, directly and via the reflectorized ceiling, also directly from the filaments (see bulb shield comments above).

I used some high-heat-resistant matte black paint on the lamp's floor, ceiling, distorted reflector heel directly behind the burner, burner legs and grommets, and the small distorted areas of the reflector directly in front of the locating lugs. The resultant unlensed beam pattern exhibited considerably less stray light outside the beam pattern, while the beam pattern itself was scarcely changed (visually -- no photogonio range available).

Next, I took a look at a Sylvania Xtravision H6054XV headlamp. This lamp uses a twin-transverse C6/C6 burner -- essentially an HB1 burner but with a 65/55w high/low filament pair emitting an estimated 1300/1000 lumens. The beam pattern from the assembly is very poorly formed and focused. The hot zone is large, poorly defined and of low peak intensity, there is a large and intense vertical spike of light, absolutely zero cutoff and

*very* high levels of upward stray and flare light outside the beam pattern.

Therefore, I was surprised when I separated the lens from the reflector to find that the unlensed beam is very tight and well focused -- a properly oriented (horizontal and square with the vertical and horizontal) "bowtie" of light as one might expect to see from a transverse filament placed on the focus of a parabolic reflector. Stray light levels remained fairly high owing to near-heel distortions in the reflector and ghost images (reflections of the transverse filaments in the burner envelope glass, subsequently picked up and distributed by the reflector).

I used matte black paint on the floor and ceiling, the distorted reflectorized area of the heel, and the burner "legs". This reduced reflected upward stray light considerably, but a considerable amount still remained since the levels were initially very high and ghost images from transverse filaments cannot be really effectively be dealt with -- the only way to mitigate or eliminate them is to use a burner with spherical rather than tubular glass, and no such burners exist. Of course, as was the case with the GE NightHawk, the addition of black masking material to reflective but optically-useless areas of the reflector/housing did nothing to attenuate the stray light coming directly from the filaments. A halfway job of containing this light was effected by masking the inside of the lens rim, but a bulb shield is really the only way to do the whole job.

Prescription factors in beam formation were verified by placing different lenses in front of different reflectors. Using the lens from the standard nothing-special GE H6052 headlamp with the *reflector-burner* from the Sylvania H6054XV Xtravision headlamp resulted in a much better focused and formed beam pattern than from the Xtravision lens. Both of these lenses were designed for use with transverse filaments. Using the GE NightHawk lens in front of the Xtravision burner-reflector yielded a less well-formed beam (this lens was designed for axial filaments).

Using the Xtravision lens in front of the transverse-filament GE H6052 burner-reflector resulted in a poorly-focused, poorly-formed beam.

Conclusions:

Rectangular reflectors (those with floors and/or ceilings) need masks during the aluminization stage of production to keep shiny stuff off optically useless surfaces where it causes upward stray and glare light. Bulb shields are feasible and should be used. And, the Sylvania Xtravision lens prescription is garbage!

(NB- the Silverstar beams use Sylvania's standard lens, not an Xtravision type. Focus is just as poor, but differently so.)

area, else I'd try

Do a websearch on H4656NH and you should turn up some sources. Or you could put in some decent H4s. Bosch makes good ones in your size format and they shouldn't be too hard to find.

DS

WHOA THERE big fella, WHATEVER you do, do NOT listen to a single word of advice that this "desertbob" douche says- he has been proven wrong about 10 times in the last 24 hours- his "tech tips" will destroy your car !

Please troll somewhere else.