factory HIDs have projector lenses, not reflectors, so it’s a moot point. people who stick HID capsules in reflector housings designed for halogen bulbs are assholes.
no it does not. the frame of your steering wheel is cast magnesium. The core support that surrounds the radiator of your car and locates the headlamps is cast magnesium. Some cars have the frame of the dashboard made from cast magnesium. Magnesium does burn extremely hot with a blinding white flame, but you have to get it really really hot first.
it’s most likely not hurting anything to have them on, but the thing to consider is that the fog lights don’t project very far in front of your car. If anything pops up that the fog lights illuminate that the headlamps don’t, you’re not going to have time to react anyway.
I guess I am confusing something here WRT magnesium v magnesium alloys. I vaguely recall strips of (pure?) magnesium in a science kit I had as a lad that boiled water furiously when introduced to it.
magnesium, like aluminum, is actually quite reactive. however, both form a protective oxide layer almost instantly upon being exposed to air.
ETA: in chemistry classes, we had demonstrations of stuff like this with metallic sodium, lithium, and potassium. They went batshit when placed in water.
Fog lights are separate lights, mounted low on the car. On my car (Subaru Outback) there is a switch on the dash for turning them on. Turning on the high beams deactivates the fog lights since there is no scenario where you want the high beams AND the fog lights on at the same time. If it is foggy, the high beams will reflect off the fog and reduce your visibility dramatically.
OEM HIDs don’t blind anyone. Automotive lights are extremely tightly regulated by the relevant transportation authorities in every developed country and auto makers spend massive amounts of money making sure their lights don’t blind people. If your car’s instructions tell you not to use foglights when there 's no fog then you should follow those instructions.
In most European countries using foglights when there’s no fog out is illegal.
HID usually only refers to the type of bulb and it is possible to have a reflector type HID headlight. Late 90s luxury cars like those jellybean Lincoln Mark VIIIs and Acura RLs had them.
The bits of magnesium alloy landing gear on planes will burn right through the deck of an aircraft carrier, I’ve been told.
“Some 85% of North American cars have aluminum engine blocks today, a figure expected to reach 90% penetration within five years…”
Also, an aluminum engine block has a **huge **bearing on how a car warms up. Aluminum acts as a heat sink and warms both more evenly and *much *faster than iron. Also, because pistons are aluminum, when they’re used in an iron block they have to be made smaller (i.e. looser) than the block’s cylinder bore to allow for the significantly greater heat expansion ratio of aluminum vs. iron. This means that until the iron engine block & aluminum pistons both come up to temperature and expand the engine runs much poorer.
Oh, and as far as fog lights are concerned, they’re strictly for looks. Yeah, they do work better in fog, but nobody gives a shit about that. They’re available & desired on American cars because they look cool.
If you are driving at low speed, then yes, fog lights will help you see more when added to driving lights. If you are driving at speed, you will be outrunning your fog lights, so they will be useless, leaving you entirely dependant of your driving lights despite both fog and driving lights being on at the same time. As has already been pointed out, if you use both at the same time your pupils will adjust to the brighter light, and you will not see as well further down the road where the light is dim.
Speak for yourself on that one. I drive in fog and in snowstorms a fair bit, and greatly appreciate having fog lights that let me continue on my trips (albeit slowly) rather than having to stop due to the reflected glare from my driving lights.
About 1/2 right. From an emission point of view aluminum is the perfect material heats up quick and throws off heats easily.
But from a longevity point of view aluminum is horrible. Anybody recall the original Vega engine?
Pistons really like to run in cast iron. Great longevity excellent sealing.
What a number of car makers (if not all) are doing is casting a cast iron liner around each cylinder that is a few mm thick. This allows for the best of both worlds, the piston is happy running in cast iron, and the balance of the block is aluminum for its advantages with emissions.
Yeah, and one time that guy really needed AWD to get up that hill when it snowed, so that rationalizes every AWD car ever sold to anybody anywhere.
Look at every trim level for every car available today, and you’ll notice that fog lights are absent or optional on base models and standard on premium models. (See OP, who has the GT model that came standard with the V8 and fog lights, as opposed to the lowly V6 model that had to get supplemental fog lights from gasp Autozone.)
Sales of fog lights are not localized to foggy areas, and 90% of the cars that have them drive around with them on 24/7 (see OP) just to let everyone else know that they could afford them in the first place.
I’m not discounting your personal need for them, but if you’re being honest, then you’re 1 in a thousand, and you’re not the driving force behind sales of fog lights.
this is true for the cylinder heads; the '90s GM LT1 used aluminum heads combined with reverse-flow cooling to ratchet up compression ratios and improve efficiency.
the 2300 was torpedoed by it’s woefully inadequate cooling system. warping of the open-deck block was what killed Vega engines, not the liner-less cylinders. Porsche and BMW have used nikasil alloys to cast linerless aluminum blocks.
pistons don’t give a shit so long as they’re designed properly for the engine block design and material.
Canadian North Shore of Superior. Lots of fog. Lots of snow. Lots of distance between towns where one can stop for the night. Fog lights are the shiznits for these conditions. Same goes for four wheel drive when the winter storms hit around here.
Yup, when we did the experiment in class we cleaned up the magnesium with emery cloth and it made bubbles really slowly with cold water, way less exciting than any of the alkali metals. You could run hot steam over magnesium ribbon and get a quick enough reaction to make a steady stream of hydrogen to burn off, but it’s small beer next to dropping a chunk of sodium in water and the magnesium itself doesn’t do anything interesting - you need to ignite it in air, or pure oxygen for choice, to get the blazing white flame.
Also, this is thin ribbon. A big chunk of metal is going to be less reactive still (less surface area per unit volume).
All of the above said, I doubt any high-street chemistry kit had sodium metal in it. :dubious:
With regard to fog lights- The last three vehicles I’ve had all had OEM fog lights. Thing is, they all only came on with the headlights. Yes, they had a separate switch, but it was wired after the main headlight circuit. So you could never use just the fog lights. I’m assuming its a safety issue, so people don’t mistake their fog lights for their headlights. But it also means they can’t really ever work as fog lights. So the only real reason car makers include them is aesthetics (i.e. they look cool!)
And in all my cars that had them I’ve turned the fog light switch on and just left it there. In dusk & dawn driving they do more than look cool, they make your vehicle more visible to other drivers. But mostly, they just look nice. And they have no effect on oncoming traffic, they’re not bright enough.
Yes, those certainly are decorative only. I don’t think that means that the only real reason car maker include thims is aesthetics. Your car maker for your model, certainly yes. But there are others (such a mine), where they are functional as opposed to only being decorative.
Sorry about the spelling – just waking up. Once my brain starts working I’m hitting the road for a six hour drive along part of the top of Lake Superior. Yippee!
