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Boomslang Upgrade Headlamp loom - a sort of review


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Hi there,

I washed my 110 (2004 Td5) for the first time in a long while a couple of weekends ago, and noticed how shabby and dull (and awash internally) my original running lamps were, so I thought I'd bite the bullet and fit the NAS lamps I'd bought three or four years ago but never got round to fitting because I’m always reticent about molesting bodywork to fit things unless absolutely neccessary. (Read Lazy) I thought I’d check out the current offerings and ended up ordering a set of RDX front and rear sidelights and indicators from Bolt on Bits on eBay in the original Defender sizes. They arrived very promptly and were fitted in no time at all, and I am absolutely delighted with them; The Bolt on Bits eBay blurb says “This little lamp punches way above its size, no need to upgrade to NAS spec lamps” and I completely agree. They have transformed the vehicle, and I cannot recommend them enough. They look remarkably similar to the Wipac LED offering, but were a little less expensive.

After fitting them I noticed my headlamps looked very yellow compared to the LED sidelights. I upgraded the headlamps about six years ago when I bought the car by replacing the Wipac Quadoptics with the Wipac clear lenses and some xenon bulbs (can’t remember which). These were a vast improvement when I originally fitted them, but have since appeared to have grown steadily dimmer over the ensuing years. So after a recent lamp switch fail, (Under alarming circumstances) I went down the Relays On The Lighting Circuit route and found the Boomslang headlamp upgrade Loom in stock at Paddocks. Ordered Monday, delivered Wednesday; Thank you Paddocks. Ok. I could have made one myself, but for £23 + vat and postage, I doubt I could have got all the materials.

As I have said, the main reason for uprating the wiring was to avoid any recurrence of the instant and jaw-droppingly scary total blackout conditions when my switch failed at speed on a winding B-road at the dead of night, and my puny human brain processed the switch failure information in what seemed like four days but was probably a few milliseconds, and I managed to wrestle madly with the lighting stalk and eventually got home safely by blinding every oncoming motorist I met.

So this afternoon I fitted it. I must say it was reasonably pain free although certainly not the ‘fitted or removed in minutes’ I had read in various places. By the way, I had noticed the Wipac clear lenses had developed a nasty ‘haze’ on them which accounted for their slow degrading over the years which I largely removed with a good rub with Autosol polish - The lenses are polycarbonate, not glass (this improved the output before fitting the Boomslang Loom)

I didn’t have any issues with the ‘dim-dip’ relay I have read about, but the first thing I noticed was the headlamp bulbs were noticeably whiter and didn’t have the yellowness when compared to the LED sidelights.

I waited till dark for a proper test around the back lanes of the New Forest where I reside, and am really very happy. Whilst the difference is not ‘Night and Day’ it is really very obvious and very reassuring. Both main and dipped beam are so improved I would have absolutely no hesitation in recommending either this loom, or a similar home made one, and the Wipac clear lens headlamps. In fact I have a a pair of 130watt pencil beam KC daylighters that have been waiting patiently to be fitted (because I can’t find a suitable ‘A’ bar) for as long as the NAS lights have, and now there’s even less hurry to fit them.

I hope other owners may find this useful.

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I have also fitted this loom, of course about 2 weeks before the "headlight loom group buy" thread was started in the for sale section. Your right, they are not as straight forward to fit as they claim but What a difference!

post-8190-0-10950700-1455255842_thumb.jpeg

Using standard "dirty" defender headlights with osram night breaker bulbs. Only thing now is I think I have to sort my sidelights...

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Don't have experience of this loom and I made-up my own loom/fuses/relays etc and ran it across the bulkhead and down the wings. Thought it best to avoid anything across the front/rad panel.

Would hope/expect that a standard product like this would do the same...

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I started by fixing the boomslang loom relays in a sensible(ish) starting position in the passenger side headlamp well out of the rain, and then running the drivers side headlamp cable over the top of the rad under the plastic shroud (mine's a td5) and into the driver side headlamp well squeezing under the power steering reservoir. I thought I'd be tight on space but there was actually bags of it. The feed came from a fat (fused) cable from the battery box which I soldered and heatshrinked to an area on the wing where the heater box is, so I can tap into it in future when I add extra lights.

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Does the Boomslang loom use a single feed from the battery - if so, I assume that is a single point of failure for all lamps - one broken fuse and no headlights at all ? ( as opposed to the 4 individual circuits on the existing loom )

Not necessarily an issue, but just about to do thos, and deciding whether to DIY

Richard

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Does the Boomslang loom use a single feed from the battery - if so, I assume that is a single point of failure for all lamps - one broken fuse and no headlights at all ? ( as opposed to the 4 individual circuits on the existing loom )

Not necessarily an issue, but just about to do thos, and deciding whether to DIY

Richard

I did a DIY relay upgrade, 4 fuses in mine ;)

If I get round to it there needs to be two new looms made up for the left and right lights to incorporate DRLs, front fog lamps and A bar spots.

The idea is to fit a new fuse and relay board on to the header tank bracket and run everything from there, not certain yet as my spiders web on paper confuses me more each time I look at it :(

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I did a DIY relay upgrade, 4 fuses in mine ;)

If I get round to it there needs to be two new looms made up for the left and right lights to incorporate DRLs, front fog lamps and A bar spots.

The idea is to fit a new fuse and relay board on to the header tank bracket and run everything from there, not certain yet as my spiders web on paper confuses me more each time I look at it :(

Exactly what I did on my Defender 12 years ago. This any help ?

http://landytown.myfastforum.org/about7578.html

Basically what I've been doing to my cars since 1965

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Does the Boomslang loom use a single feed from the battery - if so, I assume that is a single point of failure for all lamps - one broken fuse and no headlights at all ? ( as opposed to the 4 individual circuits on the existing loom )

Not necessarily an issue, but just about to do thos, and deciding whether to DIY

Richard

Not really different from the known failure of the main light switch !

Regardless of how many looms LR built in, one point melts and you have no dipped beam feed at all!

My view is it's maybe a vulnerability but likely to last longer than the light switches do without the loom. Worst case is a dozen screws to plug in old loom / connectors if it should fail....

Yes, more points fed separately by different power feeds would be ideal, but for a plug and play solution this is pretty good and simple.

Regards

Neil

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  • 3 years later...

I'm late to the game and this seems the most recent thread I could find on the subject - apologies for the necro post.

I'm looking at doing this too - the thought of a blackout on a narrow country road fills me with dread. I would prefer the plug and play route however as mentioned already, a single point of failure brings me back to square one.

Is there any reason I couldn't separate the feed wires going to the relays and put individual fuses in rather than the combined single 40A fuse that's part of the loom?

Cheers,

Blair

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I made my own loom, fed direct from alternator, then splits to dip & main relays with fuses then to left headlights, across front of radiator to right headlight, made a big difference,  also replaced the old crystal lens headlights for new ones & Osram night breakers lights which are the 120% brighter versions. 

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22 hours ago, Retroanaconda said:

No reason not to improve it, the Boomslang is quite poor quality I had found.

You can DIY as above fairly simply or just buy the Landreizger one which is very nicely made and plug and play. Has two feed cables from the alternator too so built in redundancy. 

Good advice - will go with the Landreizger kit 👍

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Five years after fitting what was later to become The Boom-slang (originally £5 posted form China), I don't think there is an original part. Relays went first, then headlight connectors...

Mines on a D1, so actually very easy to improve upon. 

I make them up for folk now...

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I'm using the Landreiziger loom, it's been on for a few years now and has been rock solid with no problems. Sometimes you get what you pay for ! 

Mo

(Who regrettably is not rich, is on an NHS salary and went without other shiny bits to buy the loom 😉)

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  • 1 month later...

Digging up an oldish thread but I'm going to back James up with saying the Boom-slang is not the best of quality. I was driving over from Skye a couple of weeks ago when I lost the high beam (and thus all headlights in that position) due to a fuse for the passenger side high beam going. Luckily dropping back to normal headlights and there was light so carried on. Did some digging around before the drive south and high beam started working again without anything significant being done so thought chaffed wire that I'd relocated - anyway set off on the 13h drive south and half way through Wales fuse popped again.

Just about finished dismantling the front of the vehicle chasing wires through and couldn't find a single dodgy wire. Bypassed the Boomslang wiring harness that's been in there for probably just over 3 years - back to the original wiring and everything appears to be working fine for the moment so I suspect something dodgy is going on with the relays in the harness. So will run that for a while to see whether it's rectified the problem and if so will go down the route of building my own loom. At the time the off-the-shelf loom was nice and quick to install but looks like it's a bit of a false economy.

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I've just finished putting relays into my lighting loom.  It was really quite simple, needs only 2 relays and keeps all lights fused by their original fuses.

The lighting circuit is fairly simple, big brown wire (permanent 12v live) feeds the main headlight switch, headlight switch directly feeds sidelights, second click of switch puts power out on a solid blue wire.  This wire goes through the loom to the fusebox where it goes through a relay (ignition switched relay, purely turns the lights off when the key is turned off, it doesn't take any load off the switch).  The blue wire then returns to the indicator stalk which acts as a changeover switch between dip and main beam.  Dip beam feed is then on a blue/red wire and main beam on a blue/white leaving the indicator stalk.  Before these wires reach the fusebox they T off into 2 to feed lh and rh lamps.  Fused feed then goes to headlights.

What i did was cut and extend the wires just after they leave the indicator stalk, use the feeds from the indicator stalk to trigger the relays on pin 85, pin 86 to earth (One relay for dip and one for main).  Take a nice chunky live feed to the Relays (Wise to fuse this wire at around 15amps, it will see the load of both lights) on the switching side (i.e. pin 87 or 30) then the other terminal to the wire in the loom where you cut it from the indicator stalk.

Doing it like this, you only need 2 relays, you keep all your factory fuses doing their original job, it can all be hidden behind the dash (mine are in relay holders screwed to the bulkhead alongside heated rear window voltage sensitive switch), you don't have to touch the loom in the wings and you take all the load off the switches.

 

Hope that helps somebody.

Dave

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  • 3 years later...
On 11/5/2019 at 2:05 PM, dave88sw said:

I've just finished putting relays into my lighting loom.  It was really quite simple, needs only 2 relays and keeps all lights fused by their original fuses.

The lighting circuit is fairly simple, big brown wire (permanent 12v live) feeds the main headlight switch, headlight switch directly feeds sidelights, second click of switch puts power out on a solid blue wire.  This wire goes through the loom to the fusebox where it goes through a relay (ignition switched relay, purely turns the lights off when the key is turned off, it doesn't take any load off the switch).  The blue wire then returns to the indicator stalk which acts as a changeover switch between dip and main beam.  Dip beam feed is then on a blue/red wire and main beam on a blue/white leaving the indicator stalk.  Before these wires reach the fusebox they T off into 2 to feed lh and rh lamps.  Fused feed then goes to headlights.

What i did was cut and extend the wires just after they leave the indicator stalk, use the feeds from the indicator stalk to trigger the relays on pin 85, pin 86 to earth (One relay for dip and one for main).  Take a nice chunky live feed to the Relays (Wise to fuse this wire at around 15amps, it will see the load of both lights) on the switching side (i.e. pin 87 or 30) then the other terminal to the wire in the loom where you cut it from the indicator stalk.

Doing it like this, you only need 2 relays, you keep all your factory fuses doing their original job, it can all be hidden behind the dash (mine are in relay holders screwed to the bulkhead alongside heated rear window voltage sensitive switch), you don't have to touch the loom in the wings and you take all the load off the switches.

 

Hope that helps somebody.

Dave

Hi Dave,

I am new to electrical stuff but I would like to learn a little more about how exactly you did this. I bought a boomslang kit which I can cut apart or I can buy relays and wires if I know what I’m supposed to be running wires between, connectors, relays types and where to place, etc. 
 

Do you have a sketch of what you did and any photos?

 

I would be very grateful. My headlights are temporarily wired up but I would prefer to get the relays behind the instrument panel/cluster and not in the space behind the headlights, etc. 

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