I hooked up my Hella 500s last night. I had to bypass the fuse because I think it was not working, so I wired straight from the battery to the relay until I can go buy a new fuse.

Anyway, I turned everything on & wire's started smoking & frying. Anyone have any idea what I did wrong?

 

Which wires?
Under the hood, behind the switch?

If behind the switch, you had a wire reversed.
A little info on how I "rewire" my Hella 500s.

Not all relays are the same either, so you need to pay close attention to the little #s on them as to where each wire goes.
Some relays have the poles in different locations.

And yes, you should be using a fuse between your battery and the relay.
It could save your rig from becoming a huge torch.

 

and i found this out as well...and also found out that Hella has different wiring instructions for their fogs vs their driving lights. I wired mine up as per the instruction and ended up popping the inline fuse to the battery. After scratching my head and cursing i wired it up the way it was for my fog lights and bam it worked.

def look at the diagram on the relay itself as it is more accurate than the instructions at times.

 

OK, got everything going tonight. I bought a new relay (the smoke coming out of the other last night made me think I better just replaced it). Put the wires back together & everything worked. I love the Toyota rocker switch.

As for the 500's, I'm not overly impressed. I have some KC 375K candlepower that I think lit things up quite a bit more, but they would stick out too far w/o an aftermarker bumper. I'll try them out a bit more before I decide for sure how much I like them.

I recently cancelled my Titan order & decided I'm going to try to keep the 4Runner for another 100K (I'm at 114K right now). It runs great. I just wish I could figure out how to improve the ride. Maybe it's the tires. Anyway, thanks for the replies.