When enjoying your vintage car or truck, we all hope to bring them back home safely. Better vision is one of the best ways to improve driving safety for you and everyone else on the road. There are many ways to upgrade your vintage ride to help it be seen, but did you know there are some easy ways to get brighter headlights to help you see better while driving as well?

Brighter Headlights With Decreased Load

We learned about a simple quad-headlight harness upgrade from Painless Performance that was designed to greatly improve the amount of light offered by your headlights while taking the load off the rest of your car or truck’s wire harness. This is a huge benefit if you’ll be adding power-hungry torches on the front of your vintage ride, but it also improves the output of those OEM-style, sealed beam headlights found on all vehicles since before the invention of the halogen bulb.

The replacement headlight harness is a complete kit with connections for the headlights installed. You only need to mount the relays, lay out the harness, and hook up the power and ground wires.

Our 1964 Chevelle underwent a restoration in 2009, and the T-3 high beam bulbs were in the car when purchased in 2004. At best, the wiring harness in our Chevelle is 15 years old. Many cars are still running on the original harnesses and switches they left the factory with back in the ‘60s. Also, our OEM-style sealed beam bulbs rely on a heated filament wire inside the housing to generate light as it heats up. The amount of light produced is dependent on the amount of current sent through the filament. This simple harness upgrade gives you brighter headlights by supplying full battery current to each bulb when needed. The harness is easy to install by plugging into your original wiring and adds a direct power supply and two relays to supply all four headlights.

“When Painless Performance first designed this four-headlight wiring harness, it was so all four headlights would be on when in high beam operation,” says Dennis Overholser of Painless Performance. “It corrected previous vehicle switching where when going from low beams to high beams, the low beam bulbs would go out with only the high beams being illuminated. We then added relays to get even brighter headlights because they got full battery voltage. This eliminated the voltage drop occurring when the current to each bulb was running through the headlight and dimmer switches.”

An electrical relay uses high-amperage and low-amperage connections to separate the power-hungry headlight circuit from the switches and other parts of the control circuits. The relay’s high-amperage circuit carries power from the battery, directly to the load — in this case, the headlights. The low-amperage circuit only acts as a switch by powering an electromechanical switch inside the relay, which controls the opening and closing of the high-amperage circuit. Now, the new harness supplies direct battery power to each bulb through the high-amperage load circuit of each respective 40-amp relay, and the only current carried by the factory harness and switches is to power the coils within each relay, which only requires mere Milliamps to operate.

Improve Driving Safety, Vision, And Longevity

We could easily tell everyone to completely rebuild the wiring harnesses in their vintage vehicles to improve the light output of their headlights, but the beauty of this harness is that it adds all the components of a modern lighting harness without the need for a total rebuild of your car’s harness. Of course, this harness won’t correct a faulty switch or lighting circuit, but it will increase the longevity of a properly operating circuit thanks to a much lower amperage load. You’ll enjoy improved safety by seeing and being seen better as well.

The headlight harness plugs into one of the factory bulb connections to switch between the high and low beam and only needs to be wired directly to battery power and ground. You’ll also need to locate a mounting space for the relays and fuse. We mounted ours on the left, front area of the core support near the horn relay and trimmed the power and ground wires to fit. We installed the new harness following the factory harness routing, being careful to be out of sight and away from possible heat sources. We used zip ties to secure the harness up in the core support and out of sight. With everything connected, we were excited to see the difference.

We checked both the low-beam and high-beam headlights in the garage and they were visibly better in performance and brightness. Then, we took a test drive to see the improvement in the real world. Living in a rural area, you never know what is lurking out beyond the glow of your headlights. Even with the same sealed beam headlights that have been in the grill for decades, we were quite impressed with how much better those same bulbs illuminated the road in front of us.

Many enthusiasts will upgrade to LED lights for improved driving safety, but some will always appreciate the vintage look of a sealed beam headlamp. We’ll be upgrading our Chevelle’s lighting to LED in the future for a more modern appearance, but for some, having those coveted T-3 bulbs is a non-negotiable. Thankfully, this headlamp harness upgrade works with any style of bulb. It offers considerable improvements to driving safety, driver vision, and being seen by other drivers on the highway. If you plan on driving your vintage car or truck, a power-supplying harness from Painless Performance is a great way to keep your ride safe, day or night.