Verne Simons
Senior Editor, Jp
In this day and age when obnoxiously bright and super-expensive light bars are all the rage and annoying bluish headlights hide under useless scowling aftermarket grilles, it’s astonishing but true that there are still lights available that are more about function than form. Believe it or not, for a few of us who are old-fashioned or just old and cranky, there is such a thing as too much light. Like when you’re at camp, or perhaps creeping around the desert in an old Jeep on a night with a full moon. Times like these can be enjoyed without a million lumens threatening to burn your retina at the flick of switch.
All right, our old curmudgeon rant is over (forgive us). To be honest, even those of us who enjoy the serenity of the dark do need light to see now and then. A good example could be any time you need to use a winch after dark, or perhaps while digging for that all-important tool at dusk.
As you know, Rigid Industries has quite a name when it comes to modern LED lighting. Rigid’s lights are designed, engineered, and assembled in the USA and are some of the best vehicle-mounted LED lights available. And while Rigid does manufacture those light bars we scoffed at earlier, the company also manufactures a more utilitarian light, the D2 XL auxiliary lights. Also, since Rigid was just acquired by Truck-Lite, we expect to see a lot more from this lighting power house. We got a chance to install and then play around with a set of Rigid’s D2 LXs, and the results are amazing.
We got a set of lights from Rigid Industries with a powdercoated metal housing, stainless mounting hardware, and polyurethane-impregnated vibration isolation plates.
The assembled light is a nice compact unit with 12 LEDs per light. The vibration isolating mount is for long-lasting use. The lens is made of abrasion-resistant, virtually unbreakable polycarbonate and is sealed to the housing using a silicon seal.
The Rigid lights came with an assembled wiring harness with weather-resistant plugs, a relay with a metal mount, a fuse, terminal ends, and a nice illuminated switch. The full harness has shrink wrap to help prevent abrasion to the wiring. That’s pretty awesome when you remember that some lights don’t even come with a harness.
Another feature of this harness is that the two leads for the two lights are long and separate. This means that we could mount one light up front and one in back of our short Jeep for illumination on either end. Also, wiring these lights on a large truck would be simple thanks to the extra length in the harness.
PhotosView SlideshowThe difference is stunning. On the left, just our sad and pathetic stock TJ headlights. On the right, you can see that the rigid lights lit up the rocks in front of us like it was daytime. Nice bright white illumination fills the area in front of the Jeep rather than just two dim and yellowish bars of light from the factory headlights.
