Midwest Light Creations- HID Headlights and Retrofit Kits (Headlights by Jeff)

boertje said:

Carbonbl, which ballast are you using? I trashed the original 35w DC ballast Jeff first sent out and got some 55w AC type. Wow, major difference. They are now as good overall as my bug with OEM HID.
Jeff now has the better ballast if you don't have them already.

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I got them from Jeff, I didn't specify a wattage when ordering so I'm not sure.

Any ballast sold by me in 2014 would have been a 55W AC. The last set of 35W that I sold was back in November. I took December off and most of January. When I started making lights again I went 55W AC.

boertje said:

Carbonbl, which ballast are you using? I trashed the original 35w DC ballast Jeff first sent out and got some 55w AC type. Wow, major difference. They are now as good overall as my bug with OEM HID.
Jeff now has the better ballast if you don't have them already.

Click to expand...

DC hid never caught on since it was used first and last by ford on the Lincoln MK VIII.




Sent from my iPhone. There may be horrible grammar and misspelling involved

20IndigoBlue02 said:

DC hid never caught on since it was used first and last by ford on the Lincoln MK VIII.




Sent from my iPhone. There may be horrible grammar and misspelling involved

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The ballasts I received from Jeff with my order last year were DC and quite frankly a disappointment. Jeff and I both have become educated since. . I would go with Jeff again in a heart beat. He is A 1.

Hello everyone,

In an effort to streamline some processes, I have been working on a website to showcase various products. It is not complete (checkout does not work just yet) but customers can read up on the various lights I offer and play around with pricing options. The car checkout area gives shipping quotes as well. Additionally, I created a FAQ page that answers a number of questions that commonly come my way.

The goal here is to make information about my headlights more accessible and reduce the time it takes for customers to learn about them. As always, I am committed to customer service of the highest degree and can still be reached by PM, email, or phone at any time.

As for the name, "Midwest Lighting", I decided it was necessary given that I also work on a variety of other makes and models outside of VW. People say that mid-westerners are always dedicated to working with others to achieve a common goal with an emphasis personal communication, and I think that attitude is descriptive of my approach toward making these lights.

Until the cart is working, orders will still be placed by contacting me directly through PM, email, or phone. I wan to thank everyone here once more for the support you have offered me though this site. TDIclub is an excellent resource and that is made possible by all of you.

http://jeffrudzinski.wix.com/midwest-lighting

Jeff

freakwithracket said:

Hello everyone,

In an effort to streamline some processes, I have been working on a website to showcase various products. It is not complete (checkout does not work just yet) but customers can read up on the various lights I offer and play around with pricing options. The car checkout area gives shipping quotes as well. Additionally, I created a FAQ page that answers a number of questions that commonly come my way.

The goal here is to make information about my headlights more accessible and reduce the time it takes for customers to learn about them. As always, I am committed to customer service of the highest degree and can still be reached by PM, email, or phone at any time.

As for the name, "Midwest Lighting", I decided it was necessary given that I also work on a variety of other makes and models outside of VW. People say that mid-westerners are always dedicated to working with others to achieve a common goal with an emphasis personal communication, and I think that attitude is descriptive of my approach toward making these lights.

Until the cart is working, orders will still be placed by contacting me directly through PM, email, or phone. I wan to thank everyone here once more for the support you have offered me though this site. TDIclub is an excellent resource and that is made possible by all of you.

http://jeffrudzinski.wix.com/midwest-lighting

Jeff

Click to expand...

Nice site Jeff, good luck!

Tony

While I'm your biggest fan, I would be negligent if I didn't mention 'styleish' should be 'stylish' on your home page. Just sayin... Still have a set of your lights in mind for my car... someday. TB's and other things to deal with right now. Nice site and best of luck.

Oh my, thanks for catching that Flyguy!

Good job Jeff. Now, if you only could do bug headlights.

Scary drive home with my fiance last night. Her and I were headed from Dayton, OH to Columbus going North on I-675 at about 9:45..so it was pitch black. We'd just had diner with some friends of ours that live in Dayton and had driven down there in separate cars because of our work schedules. We were going about 65-70 with her right behind me the entire way.

All of a sudden there is just a deer in the road maybe 40-50 yards in front of me running from the center of the highway trying to get to the right side. I swerved pretty hard and somehow managed to miss it by inches (I saw that thing's eyes from no more than a foot away). My fiance told me that she saw the deer at about the time that I swerved. By the she got up to it the deer was presumably further over into our lane than it was when I passed it. She swerved as well, and amazingly only clipped it. Deer's head and body impacted the drivers side of her Ford Focus, shattering the windshield, denting in the fender, and taking off the mirror. Amazingly though, everything else is fine. The hood looks good as does the bumper cover and everything else. The drivers side headlight had an internal accent piece break off but it was otherwise working.

I can say this, watching her hit that deer through my rear view mirror and then watching her swerve towards the ditch was easily the scariest few seconds of my life. Luckily we both came out with no injuries at all and there was minimal damage to her car. I am biased, but I think our headlights were critical in that situation. Both our cars have retrofitted lights in there, and I can remember what the light was like before that. The fact that we both managed to even see the deer at all is amazing to me given how dark it was and how fast we were going, and to have had time to swerve out of the way to avoid it is mind boggling. With the old halogen lights there is no way I would have seen it..I would have just plowed it and likely totaled the car. Same goes for her. It is amazing how fast those situations play out too..probably 10 seconds between the time that I saw the deer and when I was running full speed down the highway to see if she was alright. Anyway, just thought I'd share that with all of you and remind everyone to drive safe and look out for deer!!

Amazing story, Jeff... glad you're both alright. I absolutely agree that top-quality lights are essential for safety. I wish the DOT would update their specifications to allow and demand higher quality lights in vehicles. Many European cars come with incredible lighting systems that don't necessarily jive with the DOT... a good example is BMW's adaptive LED headlights that even carve out a tunnel for approaching vehicles when the high beams are on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dvPZ3H1Vm4

Glad you are both ok, Jeff!

Jeff, man, I'm glad the both of you are fine...

Wow, I can relate Jeff. Living in Coastal Black Tail deer country we joke we are all hunting but using our cars as weapons. The fear and panic of hitting (or even being hit) by a deer is a real bummer, along with the collective damage to car/truck. Glad you both made it with little damage.

In for golf vi headlights..


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I have one of your last sets of 35w lights before you took your time off. I'm not happy with the current brightness also and would love to know what I should buy to get the 55w bulbs and ballists.

Thanks
Jamie

PM Sent, Jamie.

Hello everyone,
I'm excited to make some additions to my light offering! Click on the links below for more information on the lights as pricing.

Jetta VI
The Jetta VI lights feature a black accent strip and come with all the options that the rest of our lights do. At a starting price of $320, the are a great upgrade to those stock halogen lights, bringing far greater visibility and a modern look.


**Lights photoed include Audi Style LED strips and an LED angel eye. Retail for this set would be $535+ shipping and would include CAN-BUS ballasts..everything you need for these to be plug and play. For the first customer, this "display" model will be discounted to $500.

Golf/Jetta V OEM Look
These lights are designed to mimic the OEM HID headlights. Partially painted black in some areas and the addition of a GTI shroud give these a far superior look to our regular HID lights. Jetta/Golf lights include all bulbs as well.


55W AC CAN-BUS ballasts

In an effort to make the install a bit cleaner on the CAN-BUS model cars, I have decided to move over to a ballast that is CAN-BUS compatible rather than having a separate inline harness unit as has been done to this point. The new ballast comes in at $5 cheaper than the old setup, and will prevent bulb out errors just as well as the old setup.

Finally, tomorrow marks the 1 year mark of being in business! As a "thank you" to everyone on this site who has supported me, all orders placed in the next week will receive a $25 discount off regular pricing.

Hi All,

Was wondering if anyone has come across what I'm experiencing. I installed my Jetta IV 1.75 headlights and they are awesome!!!!! I then installed fog lights as described here:

http://forums.tdiclub.com/showthread.php?t=37585


Whats going on now is that when I try to flash my high beam (by pulling the turn signal stalk towards the driver's seat) the highbeam turns on, and stays on. It doesn't disengage. I have to physically turn off the lights from my Euroswitch to get them to disengage.

The fog lights work fine, they turn on and off as they should with the euroswitch, and the low beam is also just fine, it responds as it should... its just the high beam that's acting wonky.

Has anyone else done this and experienced this before, and can someone help explain why its happening and how I can fix it? I have a feeling that the two harnesses (Jeff's and the home made fog light one) are not compatible. I have tapped into the high beam fuse, so that could be part of it... Any help is greatly appreciated.

Interesting you should mention this, I just spoke with another person who had this same problem. The problem occurs because for whatever reason the OEM fog light setup uses the high beam wire on the driver's side headlight to ground out some of the electricity from the fog light system. What ends up happening is that when you activate the high beams the projector gets 12V and the shutter retracts. When you disengage the high beams, 2.9V or so stays on the high beam wire (again, this is only if you have the OEM fog wiring). That 2.9 volts is enough to keep the high beam solenoid activated.

I am pasting below some links to info on this as well as the fix. The fix seems to involve wiring in a small bulb into the passengers side headlight. The member that I discussed this with a day or two ago solved this by doing that.

http://forums.tdiclub.com/showthread.php?t=248474
http://forums.vwvortex.com/showthre...uck-on-and-no-foglights-after-HID-kit-install

Fix:
http://forums.tdiclub.com/showpost.php?p=2643201&postcount=16

Again, this only occurs if you have OEM fog wiring. The aftermarket fog wiring is different and will not affect these at all. If you do not have OEM fog light wiring and want to use the fogs, please go with the aftermarket/relay setup rather than doing the OEM wiring. Special thanks to gmenounos for hunting this information down the other day.

What worked for me was to wire a small side marker bulb between one of the high beam wires and ground. I had to try 2 different bulbs. The one that worked measured about 3 ohms. A 5 ohm bulb did not work reliably.

Greg

Yup, I had that with my bug. While the bulb solution will work, my concern was bulb burn out. Another option we used in the bug HID kits instead of the bulb was a 10 watt 27 ohm wire wound resistor. 27ohm was right for the bug, but might have to experiment to find the right ohm for your car. As mentioned previous, 3-5 ohm? Works and never will burn out.

Thanks everyone for the help. I'll get around to doing that eventually.

I did a closer inspection of the bulbs that I used to try to fix my high beam issue. The bulb that worked was a W5W. The bulb that didn't work was a W3W.

boertje said:

Yup, I had that with my bug. While the bulb solution will work, my concern was bulb burn out. Another option we used in the bug HID kits instead of the bulb was a 10 watt 27 ohm wire wound resistor. 27ohm was right for the bug, but might have to experiment to find the right ohm for your car. As mentioned previous, 3-5 ohm? Works and never will burn out.

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The 3-5 ohms that I was measuring, was the resistance of the bulbs when cold using a multimeter. A 5W bulb would have to measure about 40 ohms when lit in order to use 5W of electricity. A 3W bulb would be about 60 ohms when lit. So a 27 ohm resistor sounds like it would work fine.

Definitely don't try a 3 ohm resistor as that would consume 60W when using the high beams!

gmenounos said:

The 3-5 ohms that I was measuring, was the resistance of the bulbs when cold using a multimeter. A 5W bulb would have to measure about 40 ohms when lit in order to use 5W of electricity. A 3W bulb would be about 60 ohms when lit. So a 27 ohm resistor sounds like it would work fine.

Definitely don't try a 3 ohm resistor as that would consume 60W when using the high beams!

Click to expand...

2 years with the 27ohm. Works fine still.

Last day to take advantage of our frist annual sale! All orders placed by the end of the day today will receive $25 off.

Can't complete order!

I've had a pair of headlights in my cart since yesterday and the website won't let me check out! Can you please pm me so I can take advantage of the big sale? Thanks.

"CLOSED" FROM AUGUST 11th to SEPTEMBER 10th.

I wanted to let everyone know that I'll be taking a month off from making the headlights. I'm getting married August 31st and heading down for a week long trip to Puerto Rico (San Juan for a night then Rincon for a week..very excited). It will be a busy few weeks.

I'll do my best to finish orders placed before the 11th. If too many come in though I'll have to bump some until I return. When I start back up in Sept I'll answer order emails/PMs in the order in which they were received. As always I will promptly reply to technical support inquiries.

Jeff

Congrats! Enjoy the wedding and the trip.