940 Auxiliary Driving Lights Hella 700s

I finally added some driving lights to my 940. I've never been a fan of drilling into the bumper cover to mount some round driving lights in front of the grill, so I made some brackets and secured these Hella 700FFs to the grill.

The Hella 700FFs are a little over 7" in diameter.

The kit I ordered was complete with a basic relay wiring harness and switch. I will move this switch to one of the blanks in my dash in the future.

I was going to make a bracket that would just mount to the front license plate bracket, but that would be somewhat bulky and might not look very clean, so I decided to use the grill to mount to.

**If you have an egg crate grill, I'm sure that this will also work, you might just have to use wider brackets, etc.**

GRILL BRACKETS:

-I bought a "Crown Bolt 1-1/2 in. x 96 in. Aluminum Flat Bar with 1/8 in. Thick" from Home Depot and cut 4 lengths about 3.5" long for the brackets.

-Then, I drilled 3 evenly spaced holes in all 4 of these brackets.

-I used one of these brackets on the front and one on the backside of the grill, using the outside two holes to mount the bracket to the grill.

-I used that center hole to mount up the bracket from the Hella kit.

**I had to buy some longer hardware to mount the Hella bracket to the brackets I made**

PICTURES:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/155011082@N07/shares/k7Co38

Please feel free to PM me if you have an questions or would like more photos.

Nicely done.

Nice idea of mounting them

Very nice! Very elegant. I don't like drilling in bumper covers either...glad I'm not alone.

The grill should have enough material in it to take the additional strain of having the lamps mounted to it. You should check it every now and then to make certain that vibration is not damaging the grill. (The engineer in me talking...)

Also, don't run the lights with the covers in place. It will melt and discolor the cover. Lots of heat generated by the lamps. I've seen lots of damaged covers when this is done, but usually be people who like the way that it looks with the cover on, but don't actually use the lights at speed. 20 mph on a city street doesn't require driving lights...


Dave Riedle

driedle said:

Very nice! Very elegant. I don't like drilling in bumper covers either...glad I'm not alone.

The grill should have enough material in it to take the additional strain of having the lamps mounted to it. You should check it every now and then to make certain that vibration is not damaging the grill. (The engineer in me talking...)

Also, don't run the lights with the covers in place. It will melt and discolor the cover. Lots of heat generated by the lamps. I've seen lots of damaged covers when this is done, but usually be people who like the way that it looks with the cover on, but don't actually use the lights at speed. 20 mph on a city street doesn't require driving lights...


Dave Riedle

Click to expand...

Thanks Dave. I'll keep it in mind about the covers getting melted. I just had them on for the photo. The grill is definitely strong enough to support these lights. They aren't very heavy at all.

-Harrison

The Hella 500 and 700 lights have plastic housings so they are lighter than the a metal housing light.

I sure wish drivers around here used common sense with their aux lighting. They got extra lights and they are gonna use them is their take on it. So they just turn everything on and drive.

I bought a set of those for my wagon a little while ago. Looking forward to having more light.

Harrison:

I'm just concerned about old plastic. My 760 was stored in a climate-controlled garage for 17 years and never saw the sun. The grill was perfect.

I looked at a 940 in the junkyard and when my friend removed the grill, it just sort of crumbled. The grill in your pictures looked like new, so I'll bet it will be fine.

Still, if you check it now and then, it will never break.

If you don't, it's guaranteed to fail.

Kind of like if you don't pay your insurance...



Dave Riedle

Looks awesome... I scored some similar light for a Bimmer project that I'm working on. Luckily my friend works for https://www.bmwdiscountparts.com, so I got them for below wholesale . I know this isn't a BMW forum, but I might post some pics to show you how similar they look.

Nice work. Looks pretty similar to mine

This is inspirational for me.

I'm running a pair of ZKW driving lamps mounted behind a 10mm crimped wire mesh grill and I wanted to mount a pair of these 700's behind it.

The ZKWs are great, but they're over 20 years old and very much showing their age.

Dude you either have the best number plate or bad personal hygiene ����

Just ordered a pair or Hella 500ff.

We'll see.

I had the hella 500FF on my 123gt and they were nice on there. Just a bit small for the traditional 123gt look though. The 500 should look great behind that grill. I like that look even better with round lights behind the grill.

I used to use ZDW lights like that on my turbo but they were below the bumper and succumbed to road debris.