The former doesn't really appeal to me because of the cost and the latter doesn't appeal to me aesthetically. So I started wondering if there was an alternative. I considered opening the headlight and lightly spraying the orange lens with a tint, dulling down the orange. That then got me wondering if I could actually 'whiten' the orange indicators instead.
I recalled that some forum members had used an adhesive film called 'flyeyes' to tint their rear lights, so I wondered if I could use a similar approach. Flyeyes is a coloured film with lots of perforations to let the light through. They have lots of tints, so I went for a light grey colour - £4.99 including delivery. To avoid having to open up my own headlights just to get at the orange lenses I bought a couple of spares from g8jka. Here is a comparison of a covered lens and an uncovered lens:
This is a close up of the flyeyes covering:
This is a rather unscientific comparison of the light throughput of a covered and uncovered lens:
And this is the two lenses from a distance:
The camera seems to show the film and the perforations more than the eye sees, and I reckon that with the indicator lens being inside the headlight it will be even less obvious.
So the next question in my mind is about heat. The flyeyes film is designed to go outside the headlight, not inside, so I need to try and find out whether heat build up will be an issue. So the next task is to see how hot it gets inside a headlight. I reckon that I can remove the sidelight bulb, insert a temperature probe and leave the headlights on full beam for a while and see what happens. If it gets very hot, I'll test the covered lenses in an oven at the same temperature to see what happens.
I'd be interested to see what you think about the principle and the theory and whether I've forgotten anything?
