Original Headlights

65dartcharger, re your Westinghouse lamps: I didn't have Chrysler Canada in mind when I said "GE and Tung-Sol". I don't know for sure that Chrysler Canada bought from Westinghouse, but they certainly could have. I know they bought from GE of Canada. And things are complicated by a series of mergers and name games involving the Tung-Sol, Wagner, Westinghouse, and Philips makers and brands of American-made sealed-beam headlamps. What kind of a Chrysler part code do you see on the one headlamp?

I have a fair number of NOS sealed beams. The one pair I have readily to hand is a post-1959, pre-1966 set of new-in-box Westinghouse 6012s with the big round "W" logo in the middle of the lens. The ink stamp on the back is Westinghouse Safe-T-Beam 6012 and three dots and that's it. Nothing that could possibly be a date code. I have no comprehensive knowledge on the matter of sealed-beam date codes, but from what I have seen it is highly inconsistent in format and presence/absence. Sometimes it's nice and clear (such as "7-66"), sometimes there's something that could be a production lot code but doesn't look reliably decodable into a date (such as "A15"), sometimes there's something that could be a week-and-year 3-digit code (such as "132" meaning the 13th week of 1972) and sometimes there's nothing at all.

My advice: if you are concerned enough about originality to be seeking original-type headlamps, unless you are prepared to spend ridiculous sums of money with the sorts of vendors who think several hundred dollars is appropriate money for a NOS sealed beam bearing what might be a date code appropriate to your car...worry more about having period-correct headlamps with the right lens patterns and markings. That would mean no current-production sealed beams with "HALOGEN" in the middle and "2D1" at the top and thin-line lens prisms—the correct lens-top type designator is "2" for a 7" lamp or a high/low beam 5¾" lamp, "1" for a high-beam 5¾" lamp unless yours is a '74 or newer car in which "2D1" wouldn't be incorrect on a 7" lamp, "2C1" on a high/low beam 5¾" lamp, and "1C1" on a high-beam 5¾" lamp. (And if you gotta-just-gotta-just-gotta have an inkstamped date code on the back of your sealed beams where nobody will ever see it…okeh, go have a rubber stamp made with the date code of your choice and stamp away!)

As for whether either or both of the headlamps on your forty-six-year-old car: C'mon. There's just plain no way to state "nobody ever changed a headlamp on this car" unless you had custody and control of the car from day 1 and cared enough to pay specific attention to routine replacements of maintenance items like light bulbs. Remember, when these cars were 0 to 15 years old, they were just plain cars, not collector items. From 15 to 25 years old they were just plain old cars. After that they began to be "cool old cars" and then to acquire some collectable status. The guy who claims to be able to say with surety that the headlamps are original is full of it.

Moreover, since you are in Sweden, you shouldn't be looking at sealed-beam headlamps at all. American cars sent to Sweden got equipped with European-code headlamps, most of which (except for a few English-made items) were of replaceable-bulb design, not sealed beam. In most cases this requirement was applied not only to new cars first sold in Sweden by Chrysler (or whatever other automaker) but also to privately-imported new or used vehicles. Before Dagen H, the required headlamps would have been left-traffic items—right-traffic lamps after Dagen H. So you may want to shift your search away from the sealed beams that would be correct for your car in America, and instead seek a set of period-correct European-code lamps; those, too, look different than current-production items. I might have a set of those on the shelf as well; have to look.