seewong

Figured I'd start a thread on my latest project, upgrading my halogen housings to bixenons. I picked up bixenon housings that were hazed internally to see if I could get them to fit on my car. I first tried the "methanol" approach to get the haziness off of the inside of the lens. DON'T do this. Now I have to paint one of the shrouds Anyways, this may help someone in the future if they bought a base model and are as crazy as me to upgrade the lighting to this degree.

I currently have halogen housings with a morimoto HID kit in them, and Osram CBB D2S bulbs.



Left: Halogen housing with DDMTuning 5500k bulb, Right: Halogen housing with halogen bulb

Left: Xenon housing with Osram CBB (No lens or shroud) Right: Halogen housing with Osram CBB

I had to open up and completely disassemble the xenon housing to re-pin the harness to match that of my car. These pictures were taken while testing the functionality. Honestly, I am quite impressed with the beam pattern of the HID bulb in the halogen housing. However, the xenon housing has a better cutoff and wider spread. I have to paint the shroud or source an eBay replacement, fix the hazy pitted lens, and then finally add STI-R clear lenses for the projectors. If it all pans out, I'll break open the passenger side one. Plan on updating this thread as I go, fingers crossed

shyamvenky

Good work here Chris - I guess I'll use your learnings to decide on whether I should tear down my lights and replace the projector assembly with a Morimoto mini D2S.

My car currently has a Morimoto Elite HID kit with their H7-B bulbs in 5000K. I did evaluate whether I should get their D2S or H7 kit and ultimately chose H7 because I suspected it would be too tight.
I'm not super happy with my beam pattern and cutoff - even then they are miles ahead of the halogen lights! And to be honest, it's not fair to expect the halogen projectors to work perfectly with HID.

An old pic just to compare the light output of the HID vs halogen.



Here's the beam pattern of the HIDs - car's 8ft from the garage door But still the intense section of the beam isn't wide enough on the road.

Sporty

I put in some LED bulbs to replace my halogens in my low and high beams and fog lights. No codes, much improved lighting, look/color , less than $100 and very easy.
Only problem is when I change out the parking light to LEDs I got a code; have to find the right bulbs at some point for those, don't want to splice in resistors.

Rdsawyer35

Where did you purchase your LEDS?

Sporty

Amazon; forgot the brand. Do a search on here, you should find it.

Khloesdad

Post a pic at night on the street.

Sporty

ok - will try to do that tonight if I remember...

seewong

I did research before putting an HID kit in my car and saw that the hot spot, the bright spot in the center, is not as strong with LED. This more evenly distributed light would allow you to see your surroundings, but not as far since there is no concentrated beam straight ahead. Could you post a picture of your lights thrown on a wall as well like the ones above so we can compare?

Sporty

yep was planning to do that as well -stay tuned. Bottom line, for me this was a big and simple improvement over the halogens.

Sporty

here you go: led bulb replacements for stock halogen bulbs

low beam on road

low beam pattern

high beam road

Zeus - 6 mos Pup -gratuitous photo of our new dog

seewong

These are pretty impressive! The cutoff looks pretty crisp and the hotspot looks good to me. Which LED's do you have? I'm also impressed with the low beam road shot, although it is hard to compare across photos because of differing camera settings.

GTTommy

Holy thread revival...

Considering going down a similar route currently running halogens with LED upgrade for the time being, if I buy some oem xenon, the only thing to make them work is re-pinning? Seems too simple? Is that also the same with the 997.2 xenons? (don't care about the turning thing)

Thanks

seewong

As far as oem xenons, you can either repin your car to match that of the xenons (auto leveling won't work), or you can open up the headlights and repin them to match the car. I went with the latter to avoid messing up the harness on my car, but looking back maybe that would have been simpler. Project is at a standstill though because I have had other things come up.

GTTommy

Thanks for the info! Do you happen to
​ have a drawing to show what pins need to go where?

I assume the 997.1 and. 2 xenons are interchangeable ignoring the corning function as I may go for the later lights... Hmm.

Sporty

Why are you going thru all this - are your LEDs bulbs not enough?? I replaced my halogen bulbs with LED bulbs and they have been fantastic over the last two years, simple plug and play, inexpensive (less than 100$, all in for high, low, fogs and parking lights) no codes being thrown and are probably better illumination than the stock HIDs . What am I missing? See my posts from August 2021 in this thread.