seewong

Unfortunately the headlights are not plug and play for halogen models. You either have to repin the harness on the vehicle side or the headlight side so that they line up.

shyamvenky

I too am in the same boat - currently have the bandaid solution of a Morimoto HID kit with CANBus harness + error canceller in my car.
I wasn't comfortable with cramming all the components into the headlight assembly - so did a minor surgery and have the CANBus module outside with my own quick-disconnect harness.
I definitely didn't want to have the high-voltage wires be messed with, hence had the quick-disconnect part way upstream (input side of the ballast, which is where the CANBus error canceller has to be)

Problem with sourcing the OEM bi-xenon headlight assemblies is that decent ones are very expensive - and many don't come with the ballast/solenoid/motor etc (well, we don't need the leveling motor)
If you're anyway going to open up your lights, might as well just replace the projector with a bi-xenon one from Morimoto.
You just need to know the projector size (I think its 3", But IIRC Cayman 987.1 had 2.5" - so I'm not sure if 997 also had 3" projector lens).
You can tap into the high-beam power within the headlight assembly itself for the projector solenoid - there's a splitter available from TRS.
No re-pinning required on the car-side, it's all within the assembly

But you will still need the ugly halogen high beam (or maybe you can swap it to a cooler temp one to match the xenons).
If you throw away the high beam halogen bulb, the car will yell an error code for the missing bulb.
And if you code the car for bi-xenons, then you might see a barrage of codes for auto-leveling

This is my ambitious plan - and I'll just need a broken halogen headlight assembly to practice opening it up I guess ($250 or so I guess at max)
Overall much cheaper this way because you already have a chunk of the components like ballast, igniter etc - what you need will be a D2S harness from the igniter (instead of the H7 one) and yes, D2S bulbs
I'm still on the wall.. depends on whether I hit the jackpot on a used OEM bi-xenon set

seewong

Yep, I followed your advice when I put a DDM tuning kit in my headlights. I was able to fit everything in there pretty comfortably. I then upgraded to a Morimoto D2S kit and attached D2s to H7 adapters to Osram CBB bulbs. The kit is great but there is way less clearance in there now. I did not need the canbus or error eliminator pieces, but the D2S igniters are big enough where space is very tight.

I am looking to replace my entire housing, and be able to revert back to stock if needed. I am trying to repin the xenon housing, get everything working, and then polish out the lenses. If everything goes smoothly I'll finish it off with an STI-R clear lens swap. I have the lenses off one of the xenon housings, but am not sure how to take everything out to get to the wiring harness in the back.

shyamvenky

Opening up the lens is the hard part, and you already have that done 😊 In order to get to the harness inside the headlight, you will need to “tunnel” your way by removing each layer => the shroud, reflector parts, projector assembly and finally the white harness that’s held by some tabs. Things are either held by screws or tabs within the assembly. To remove the shroud, you first need to remove 2 screws on the outside(bottom side of the assembly). There’s tutorial where someone from TRS switched the crap lens for an STI 😊 - either on the forums or on YouTube.

here’s the pinout for the xenon headlight harness. You’ll need to remap this to conform to the ones used by our halogen harness.

seewong

Thanks for the tips shyamvenky! I already had the wiring diagram, just was too lazy to take apart the guts of the headlight since my HID kit has been performing well to my eyes. I gathered the motivation to rip everything out to get to the backside of the harness, and re-pin it. Here is how the beam pattern of the OEM xenon (left) compares to the OEM halogen housing with an HID kit (right). The pattern is wider and better distributed, but I am pretty impressed with the halogen housing + HID kit. The ballast and bulbs are the same on each side, the only difference is the housing/projector. Note that the shroud and lenses were not installed on the OEM xenon side. Next up, I need to figure out a way to level it (motors were missing from these), paint the shroud (discolored), and fix the lenses (cloudy/pitted). I'll make my own thread if I make it further

shyamvenky

Wow! Besides the cleaner cutoff line, there's not a lot of difference between the xenon and halogen-HID.
If the projector wasn't pointing in the right angle and was waaaay off, then it might be tricky to get the stepper motor to move it for you.
But since it's almost level, then you can just use the hex tool to tweak the assembly's angle itself.
Given that the halogen-HID kit is 90% performance of the xenon, do you think it's worth the effort for you?

While the amount of light is way more than halogen in mine, I'm not super happy with the beam pattern.
I still don't have a clean cutoff line and there are some hot spots in the pattern - I'll get a picture tomorrow.
That is my main motivation to change the projector itself. BTW What brand HID bulbs did you use?

seewong

Yeah, the car is actually backed in crooked (tiny SF garage, trying to get as close to the wall as I can to avoid family members door dinging/scratching the car haha). Beam points straight ahead, but is dipped because there is no stepper motor in there - the housings didn't come with them from the previous owner. I need to figure out a way to hold the projector similar to how it is held in the halogen housing with a fixed screw. If I knew the results would be this similar, I probably would have stopped at my current stage, HID kit in xenon projectors. But, since I made it this far, I am curious to see if I can get these to work well

Started a new thread on it here: https://rennlist.com/forums/997-foru...n-upgrade.html

I started out with a DDM canbus kit with DDM bulbs as a proof of concept. Everything fit in the housing and was great, but the bulbs were blue even though I ordered a 5500k kit. Ended up upgrading the kit after the bulbs started to color shift, and went to a Morimoto D2S kit with Osram D2S CBB bulbs. I used an adapter ring from ebay to fit the D2S bulb into the housing, and made new retaining clips out of the metal rods from binder clips. These bulbs produced a slightly better pattern than my DDM bulbs. The Morimoto kit is an extremely tight fit though, the D2S igniters are really thick. Feel free to reply in my dedicated thread