Bull bar

                                                                                                                             The Bull bar blues

One bracket near complete, I have spent the past 5 months tryin to source some brackets for a TJM bar (TJM bars are made in China BTW) I have rang and emailed virtually every TJM outlet and none of them can help me I think that is what they refer to as "product support" I picked the bar up for pretty much nothin but had no brackets so theres the trap, anyway I have given up and made me own, seriously .. how hard would it be for TJM just to have a metal filing cabinet full of cardboard templates to suit various popular makes and models? It's not as if I am askin for brackets for a 1951 Holden ute.

The front aprons on these things are surprisingly easy to remove, I diden't even have to remove the whole front clip, engine and transmission to do it :-)

Game over, all done bit of a nightmare but when ya quoted $350 for a mob on the coast to fabricate and fit that's when ya need to take action and do it yaself and havin mates with well equipped sheds/ workshops as in (above) a full size hydraulic lift is an absolute godsend bein able to stand up under the car rather than grovelin around on the cold concrete.

 Fabricate brace bar to take the flex outta bull bar from the bottom as it is welded to the sub frame that is not very rigid reason for this as there would be to much movement mobile the spotlights would be vibrating to much causin an annoyin illumination.

Got one spot mounted today, I put a rubber spacer between the bracket and the bar so it has just a small amount of give, will do the other one tomorrow. 

The elusive bracket (above) for a TJM bar to fit VT- VU and VY Commodore it took me 4 months just to find a pic of one so i at least had some sort of an idea as to what they looked like and how they mounted to the sub assembly, it is actually aluminium anyway I am throwin all this info on here for the poor soul who maybe lookin for a pic of one so hopefully it will help him out when the Google bots find the meta tags, I opted for the "VFX design" as ya can see (top) is totally different as mine are made of 8 mm plate steel, bugger the airbag compatibility :-)

                                                                                                                                Only a slight overkill eh?

                                                                                                                                        Spotlights 

I have chosen the Narva Taurus bull light the above are a 2x pencil beam combination where as the ones I have in the shed are a broad or fan/ pencil combo, I chose these particular spots as I had them on my landcruiser about 20 years ago and back then although they were not advertised as an off road light I still brought em and what happened was after a few months of the daily drives to and from town of 80 km of rough corrugations the mountin hardware was different to the pair above they were cold press riveted back then and the rivets would flog out and work lose overtime.

My fix for this was to remove the factory rivets and replace with nyloc bolts fashion a larger plate and i cut up an old bit of conveyor belt I found at an abandoned tin mine and rubber mounted em after that I had no problems, low and behold 20 odd years later they are far more improved over the old model and similar to how I modified mine, also back then the mountin stem was one unit nowadays they are a separate item (somethin else i will have to make as im not payin $20 each for a bit of threaded rod)

The above spots I got have had the HID upgrade kit from the H1 filament globe- I have never had this combo before in the Narva's but I had HID's on my Hilux years back with the Hella's and it made a "Hella-va" difference :-) seriously though if ya do all ya drivin at night like I do the HID upgrade is well worth the bux and those that have not experienced the difference between a standard H1 and 4 and a HID set up will blow ya away!!

The exact set up I have for the Narva's is the 12v, 55 watt D2 globes.... (by the way HID is short for High Intensity Discharge) and the 6000k generation 5 ballasts as well (the ballasts are like an ignition) the HID globes are not like ya standard filament type that tend to warp, buckle and bunch up in the filament when they are white hot and eventually self destruct the HID's are gas somethin to do with electrons gettin excited you know the story, anyway they produce up to 3-4 times brighter usable light then ya normal halogens and last 3 times longer!! the set up i have will give me over a good kilometer ahead view (usable) and some have claimed the red reflectors on the side of the road can be seen glowin out to 2 km and i believe it "usable" light is what I want because the last thing I want is a heap of heavy brakin with all the weight on board. View the vid at the bottom of this page of the exact same set up that will be goin on the ute, same spots, globes and ballasts to get an idea, a rough idea anyway.

Night drivin ...... Night drivin as I mentioned above is when i do the majority of my drivin unfortunately ya miss a lot of the scenery but as in heat stress not only on the driver but the vehicle as well is avoided not to mention a lot better fuel economy, also eye strain sets in very quickly when viewin a poorly lit road, anyway I hope this was of some interest to someone out there..... take care and safe drivin.

The above vid although not really a good overall example is the difference between the 55w 5000k HID kit in the Narva Taurus Bull Lights on the truck and a 45w 6000k set up on the car.