After having sat for so long I've decided to start taking steps to get the Monte back on the road again. Part of this involved patching up the rear since the bumper skin was of a different shade and the trunk lid still had the damaged paint from a past car fire behind the Monte. I managed to get the rear patched up enough to at least look somewhat decent while I work on eventually painting the whole car. Right now my next move on the Monte is to upgrade the headlights to LED.
This involved getting a set of H4 light sockets that fit in place of the 4x6 sealed beam headlights but use H4 bulbs. Of course instead of using incandescent bulbs I'll be replacing them with LED versions. As has always been the case with H4 LED's, there is a different wiring for these bulbs compared to the old school bulbs of the same plug style. The H4 LEDs actually use a single 12v power feed and two grounds that are switched to control the high and low beams. Luckily this would end up being pretty easy since I won't have to go in the car's old wiring to redo things. I added relays a while back so the headlight switch and the aftermarket rocker switch I added for the high beams will only switch the relays, which in turn control power to the headlights. I started off by replacing the headlight plugs with fresh units since there was only female plugs on the ends of the wires plugged to the headlights. Replacing with regular plugs makes things neater and a little less "fire hazardy" than having loose wires plugged up. In the process of wiring in the headlight plugs, I took the time to reroute wires to the relays so I can have switched grounds instead of switched 12v lines. After some playing around, I got everything figured out and had one side all wired up properly, so the lights switch on and off as intended. With the left side wired up, I duplicated the same wiring with the right side. I had to route new wires since the old wiring only took into account the one chassis ground and the switched 12v power feeds. These extra wires were routed along the same cable that was linked to the right side headlights to begin with. With the new wiring added and the light plugs wired in, I had the right side lighting up just as the left side was. Everything as far as the electrical side of this job was complete. The next move was to actually install the light sockets. Now there were a couple of small hurdles that had to be jumped when it comes to installing these headlight sockets. The first was the idea that I had to remove the whole front clip in order to be able to remove the old headlight bulbs and rings and buckets. The front clip made it extremely difficult to even get a screwdriver in to remove the screws holding the buckets in place, much less actually removing the buckets. So that had to be removed. Second, the headlight buckets have a smaller base that was made to accommodate the old sealed beam bulbs. The H4 sockets have bases that are wider to accommodate the removable H4 bulbs. What this means is I had to trim some of the metal away from the headlight bucket base to widen the opening to accommodate the H4 sockets' bases. This was easily accomplished with the angle grinder. After using a grinding wheel to knock out the sharp edges, I had the headlight buckets modified to accommodate the H4 sockets. I installed all four buckets and the H4 sockets and their rings to get them all locked in place. I installed the LED bulbs before locking the sockets in place so once they were secured, all I had to do was plug the bulbs up. After getting all the headlight buckets and sockets secured and tested once more to verify that everything still worked, I went ahead and reinstalled the front clip. This front clip has been distorted some due to past accident damage and even some of the mounting points are damaged, so as it goes, this thing did not perfectly line up as it should. I will have to get a new one at some point and probably do some bending and other manipulation of the metal that holds all this stuff together evenly in order to get even a new front clip secured and lined up properly. Anyway, with the front clip back on and secured to the best of my abilities, I was able to finally say the headlight conversion job was complete. With that, I can now say that I can drive comfortably at night without having to strain my eyes on the blacked out roads I travel. The LED's will light up any deer in the distance and ensure a safe travel down the road. The next thing that I have to do on the car is replace some valve stems in a couple of tires so they won't keep going low every few days. From there the next move is installing a fresh rebuilt engine, and maybe a 700R4 transmission so this car can really be ready for some road running.
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