I have some in the mail (gotta pick them up from the P.O. this afternoon) unfortunately, the LED’s and drivers came in one shipment and the lenses and heat sinks came in another… which isn’t here yet… damnit.
I just couldn't see spending $300+ for LED lighting so I ordered some 1000LM Cree XM-L (xmlawt) and some drivers with 3 settings (low-med-high) so I don't burn the LEDs out.
My plan was to install them IN one of my roof rack cross bars. I haven't seen this done before.
I think I will make individual housings for each LED and then just drill a big enough hole for the housings to be inserted into the cross bar. The one thing I worry about though is heat. These emitters are 10V and the warning label says that they should be treated as you would a laser because they will cause retina damage if you are too close to them. (at max power). So that leaves me with adding some sort of heat sink. Ideally, I would attach the heat sink as close to the star pcb as possible using thermal epoxy… but that leaves me with heat sinks on the INSIDE of the hollow aluminum cross bar and there won’t be any moving air in there? Back to the drawing board…
Another idea would be to use RC helicopter heat sinks on the housings. I am told that a 280 motor is about the size of the housings I want to build. Unfortunately, there aren’t many RC places up here in the high desert (that I know of) so test fitting stuff before I buy a bunch of stuff isn’t going to be easy. If I used that kind of heat sink, then I would have to have the LED housings sticking out of the cross bar a little more than I wanted. It’s not really all that far… I believe they are around 20mm deep? So that makes my cross bar look something like a comb? Well whatever, I will take pics and do a write up as I go.

(sorry for the rambling, I am mentally designing as I type)