PRODUCTS
Britpart LED products promise to shed light on a complicated market Price: £65-£225 plus VAT Available from: www.britpart.com
ONE OF THE RULES ABOUT MODIFIED 4X4S NOWADAYS is that if it doesn’t have at least one light bar, it might as well have square wheels. Back in the day, you used to start by considering the tyre size you wanted, work out the suspension lift you needed to accommodate it and take your project from there, but these days you start with the size of the biggest LED bar you can afford, figure out what kind of vehicle will look best underneath it and just muddle through from there. There’s not exactly a shortage of options in the market, along with a deafening noise of opinion, counter-opinion, speculation and sheer guff as to what’s best. Expensive and high-end? No better than cheerful and low-priced, if you believe some of the importers of said cheerful and low-priced options. Expensive brands don’t come with a free side order of prawn crackers, either. Cheerful and low priced? Like lighting a candle and apt to contain a Russian spy, if you believe some of the importers of the afore-
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mentioned expensive and high-end options. You can see where this is going. To cut through the confusion, Britpart has introduced a range of LED bars. These have various sizes and formats – wouldn’t be much of a range otherwise – and use a mixture of Cree and Osram LEDs. So there are differences. There are similarities too, though. All five of the lights in the range have a die-cast alloy housing and polycarbonate lens, come with stainless fixings and promise a lifetime of more than 30,000 hours. That’s about three and a half years, if you were somehow to need non-stop illumination and live in a place where it’s eternally night-time. The range starts with a 222mm single-row Cree unit with a 40W output and 2400 raw lumens. And it continues with what is basically the same unit again, only with a second
one piggybacked on top of it. So all the numbers are the same, except for the raw lumen output which jumps to 4800. Both these options have highbeam patterns as standard. But move up to next lamp in the range and you get a combination pattern allowing you to dim them on the road. This is a 36W dual-row Osram lamp with a length of 213mm, whose power output of 120W translates itself into a dazzling 9600 raw lumens. Getting bigger now, the next option in the range is a 570mm (22.5”) dual-row Osram LED bar putting out 120W and 9600 raw lumens. And finally, the biggest of them all is a five-foot whopper with 240W and 16,800 raw lumens. If you want to illuminate your whole street, or indeed town, this is the one to buy. It’s also the one to buy if you propose to immerse your vehicle for
long periods in water deep enough for the pressure to register. That’s because it’s waterproof to IP68, whereas the others are a merer IP67 and can therefore only cope with being dunked to a depth of 15cm-1m. Obviously, if you do propose to do this with your vehicle we’d be grateful if you’d let us know so we can come and watch. Equally obviously, if you’re going to be spending long periods of time with your truck completely submerged, an LED bar that continues to function is going to be right at the top of your list of priorities. Colour temperatures are in the range of 6000-6500K throughout the five options, which offer a world of opportunities whether you’re a big-time modified vehicle builder or just a bloke who wants to be able to see where he’s going when laning at night. Or a submarine driver. Prices will vary wildly from unit to unit and dealer to dealer – as always with the Britpart network, the key is to shop around and, once you’ve got a specialist you trust, turn yourself into one of their favourite clients.
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