DIY: HID kit in aftermarket projector headlights

[Piloter]

Before the flames start, prior to ordering the kit at all I had the local garage properly aim my headlights and verified that the beam pattern was correct.

Yes, I also know that the warning on the lights themselves state that HID bulbs are 'not allowed', and I know that the excess heat from overwattage HIDs can cause cheap reflectors to spall off the chrome on the reflectors, or (in some extreme cases) melt plastic on the housing. Well, that's why I got a 35 watt kit from DDM tuning instead of a 55 watt, and specced out a conservative 5000K color temperature for only about 700K of snob-factor over stock 4300.

The kit arrived with two slim ballasts, two well-encapsulated bulbs, and a package of mounting brackets and their screws.



One bulb had some green deposits inside the capsule...



But I've got a ticket opened with DDM about it.

For reference, these are the low beams only, running Sylvania Xtravision H1 bulbs with no cutoff mods.


And the high beams, whatever the stock bulbs were when I got the lights.



There's obviously room for improvement here.

The HID bulbs come with an extra bare-connector pigtail through their dust shields. I have removed that already. Please note that the dust cap with the headlights is considerably bigger than the one that comes with the bulbs.



What you've got to do is trim a small hole in the stock dust shield, preferably after turning it inside out...



And insert the new shield through the hole. One lip will sit inside the hole, the other lip will stay outside.





I thought the inverted dust cap looked like a cross between a pith helmet and a English policeman's cap, and The Spouse has a hobby of collecting large ball-jointed dolls, so...



Not pictured, me running like hell afterward.

Your mileage may vary on this next step, but my projectors had a LOT of casting flash on the inside of the sockets...




And this made it impossible to get the HID bulbs in. I had to take a round file to the socket and make those flat surfaces actually flat, and take a little bit off the shoulders of the curve before the bulb fit.

Now, the smart advice would be to take the headlight apart to do this and reseal it later, but the faster way is to get somebody to hold the headlight over your head and file from underneath, with a vac running to suck away the shavings. The STUPID way to do this is to lay the headlight on the counter and let the shavings build up inside the headlight. This takes time and effort to correct.

While you've got the headlights out of the car, incidentally, it's a good time to reevaluate how you've got the accessories hooked in. If you were sloppy and can't solder (like me) and electrical-taped everything into the wiring to the parking lights, this would be a great time to crimp the wires for the angel eyes and the LEDs together into a couple of male connectors, and run some wires off the parking light tap to crimp to (insulated) female connectors. This gives you a quick-disconnect for the lights and is a lot more durable. I had already run the extension wires, I just thought that--since they'd have to come right back out for the high-beam bulb install, and then again for the LED parking lamps--I might as well make things easier for Future Me.

A word of warning...these are CHEAP EBAY HEADLIGHTS. Do not trust that the projector housing is mounted securely in its plastic when you're merrily filing away. I had one slip by a few inches, and I thought I pulled it back in place but it got dislodged again sometime between putting back in the headlight and screwing everything back into place...so the next time I pop the hood, I find somebody in the household with skinnier fingers than mine and try to beg a favor.

Anyway. There's plenty of room for the slimline ballasts, even if you've got a CAI and the big washer fluid tank. I wound up using some extra double-sided-velcro (the industrial 2" wide stuff) to stick one to the battery and the other to the front side of the fluid tank. The difference, after the bulbs warm up for about a minute, is pretty pronounced.



This was where I started worrying about heat, naturally. So I let the car run for about 5 minutes with the lights on. I could put my hand over the exterior plastic on the HID side and it was barely warmer than ambient. I then put my hand on the halogen side for comparison's sake. I now have a slight burn on my hand.

So how do both low beams look? Well, remember I said one of the projectors kind of shifted out of place? For now, they look like this.



High beams? Glad you asked.



...wait, I have high beams? Yeah, I need to get a HID kit for those as well at this point.

I'm off to return an unused tungsten carbide Dremel bit (didn't work for crap in a standard-sized cordless drill to clean up the flash) and will reply to this post with the obligatory headlights-in-the-dark pictures and driving impressions. After I fix that fucking projector slip!

[Piloter]

So after some driving and some swearing, not in that order, here's what I've got for nighttime pictures. I fixed the projector slip...





And then I found somewhere dark and got out of the car.



Low beams only. This is with both low and high beams.



Here's what it looks like from inside, at least as well as a old Powershot A510 can capture.



I couldn't get any good shots of the front of the car because it's just too damn bright for the camera to cope with. Even with the flash everything came out blurred or lens-flared to hell. Also, since I know all the lighting whores out there get off to cutoff, I did what I could.

See, the last time I got those pictures up against a white wall, that white wall was the back of the county courthouse. Tonight's New Year's Eve in a small redneck town that's swarming with assholes and cops, so I didn't think that was the best idea. Nowhere else, thanks to the yuppies, is really dark, and I don't have access to a garage, so....well, here's the cutoffs on my pants leg at about 30 feet.



There's a flicker on startup, and the bulbs are full brightness within about 10 seconds. No flickers in driving, and this is with stock wiring. Total power consumption ought to be around 70 watts, down from stock 110. There's no heat issues, after about 40 minutes of driving. I could barely feel that the plastic over the low beams was any warmer than the plastic over the high beams. So no, these won't melt our enclosures.

Would I have a better pattern and better output with $400 worth of real projectors and D1S/D1R bulbs and OEM ballasts? Sure! (If I had $400, it'd go on a custom-machined bracket for the EDIS pickup so the swap can get back on track.) But for $40 and $6 for a round file, I think this is enough of an improvement over the wretched hot-spotting of the halogens in those lights to be well worth the money and time. Will probably end up getting a 4300K kit for my high beams as well.

[Bitter]

Wow, that's a really really narrow beam there with some pretty awful hot spots and a lot of glare over the cutoff.

[Piloter]

Yeah, and the sad thing is that--other than the H4s that never were possible to aim properly--that's the best output of any enclosure/bulb yet short of a full projector retrofit or swapping to sealed beams.

[Bitter]

I think you should look into retrofitting a projecting into the housing. I bet you could fit a TSX or some other 2.5inch in there.

[evoman415]

wow, very well done! the cutoff on that is clean and glare is minimal. i highly doubt that would blind oncoming drivers, pretty damn good for $46!

[Bitter]

Wut? No, that's pretty bad glare.

[evoman415]

compared to the honda guys who jam HID bulbs into halogen housings? this is 10X better. im not going to argue with you because you are what your username is... and to OP on the DIY

[Piloter]

Originally Posted by Bitter

I think you should look into retrofitting a projecting into the housing. I bet you could fit a TSX or some other 2.5inch in there.

Gold94corolla wound up running quad FX-R projectors in those housings, but he took the entire enclosures apart and fabricated mounting rails that bolted to the frame until the headlight itself was nothing more than a slide-on cosmetic shell that connected to nothing. I admire the hell out of his skills and his finished light output, but I don't have the budget, downtime, or talent to replicate his results.

http://www.hidplanet.com/forums/show...-death-UPDATED

http://www.hidplanet.com/forums/showthread.php?40126 , after he did it in the JDM H4-style housings.

http://www.hidplanet.com/forums/show...utput-pictures His final results with the first retrofit.

I'm going to drag out the good camera tomorrow night and try to reshoot some of the output photos, I don't see all of the halos and rings and etc that the Powershot is convinced exist.

[Bitter]

You don't need to go all out with that, odds are that a better projector will more or less just glue/bolt right into the housing in place of those. It looks like a G1 maybe G2 retrofit projector, they were awfully narrow like that.

[gold94corolla]

Piloter! Thanks for posting up the DIY. Have you posted these before? I seem to remember them.

Thanks for the shout-out. But I didn't start with real HID projectors. I did the same thing that you did, with those head lights and an HID kit. So, rather than "flame" lol, I'll contribute! I've had an issue with my account, but it's fixed now so I can post again lol.

First, let me say that installing these cheap HID kits in these cheap halogen projectors is a real pain in the butt. The cheap HID bulbs (like from Ebay or DDMtuning) don't have the best alignment, so it is hard to get a good output. And the projectors need a lot of tweaking to optimize the output for HID bulbs (although it will never be good).

So, I had the same exact head lights and HID scenario. Here is what I was able to get after hours of adjusting.


Yes, there is definitely glare from these head lights due to the way the projectors sit inside the outer bezel/shroud. It is not glare from the projector. (I had the same issue on my quad FX-R retrofit).

From a little further back, you can see the blue color that can be achieved with enough tweaking:



And here's my ground shot, looks very similar to Piloter's... narrow and spotty.

[gold94corolla]

Oh, and I did have an HID kit in the high beams as well, definitely a must!

[gold94corolla]

And to Piloter, I can see from your one shot that you have the same issue I had.

See in this shot, how the HID (and halogen jeez!) don't have a bright spot at the top of the cutoff step? Your HID has a dark spot there (and the halogen has no light whatsoever).



I had the same issue. It is because the bulbs aren't sitting in the projectors correctly.

If you look at the right side (ignore the left side), you'll see I had the same thing:


To fix it, I had to shave off the bumps preventing the bulbs from sitting all the way in the projectors. When removed, the bulb can insert farther into the projector, and give you the output I posted earlier. (not much better, but every bit helps lol).

[gold94corolla]

But even so, it wasn't enough light. Rather, it was enough light, just not put in the right place.

Here's a shot of the FX-R bixenon projector (top) with one of these head lights (bottom). This is why I went to the trouble to replace the head light internals with 4 FX-R! I went overboard lol.



Instead, the best way (IMO) is to take the JDM head lights and simply put one set of projectors inside (like in my sig pic). This results in the perfect light output, and is highly recommended.

http://www.gold94corolla.com/diy/lighting/headlight3/

This concludes my contribution to Piloter's great HID thread