Merry Christmas! Hope Santa is good to you.
Wanted to update you on my progress with retrofitting my car with an OEM-quality HID sleepy eye kit. If you've followed my 20B conversion thread, you'll know the pain I've gone through getting the conversion done. The good news is the process is now at an end thanks to Jesus Padilla and Kilo Racing in Orlando so I am now at a point where I can turn my attention to the little things that I don't like about the car and the biggest of those is the inferior 1990's lighting.
I have waited patiently for a kit to be built that meets my needs of vastly improving the lighting of the car while also enhancing its aesthetics. To me, this means retaining the pop up feature of the lights but making the pop up mechanism more modern, or not having it go so high up. This also means improving the functionality of the very weak lighting by bringing it up to today's HID performance standards. Finally, from an aesthetic perspective, I want to do something that looks like it might be on a car of today.
To date, none of the pop up kits have met my functionality and aesthetic standards. Kits like the Knightsports ones improve the pop up looks of the lights but aren't very good with actually improving the lighting on the car. Other kits like the one currently offered as a bi-xenon pop up upgrade dramatically improve the lighting of the FD but IMO leave much to be desired from an aesthetic perspective. So, my only choice was to go out and develop a kit for myself.
So, after much thought, the best solution for me is one that pops up about half the height of the originals and one that uses two lights per housing. My rational for the two lights per housing was to ensure the car looked balanced when the lights are being used. I want the car to look like its was designed this way, not retrofitted.
With the above in mind, I did much research on HID projector systems, wanting to find something that would give superior lighting while having OEM quality. My criteria was HID-based projector lighting for low beams as I wanted the 300% improvement in lighting that HID systems offered as well as the proper cutoff of projector style lights. For the highs, my only criteria was more lighting so for me, a halogen-based solution was just fine. To find the proper lights for my application, I spoke with the makers of OEM lighting for today's cars, including Hella. Hella then put me in touch with
www.rallylights.com, one of Hella's leading retailers, and Will from rallylights.com was most helpful. He pointed me to the Hella headlamp modules they sold and I ultimately decided on the 50mm Xenon HID projector units for the low beams and the 90mm halogen units for the high beams. The 50mm unit specs can be found here:
http://www.rallylights.com/detail.aspx?ID=1796
And the 90mm halogen units are here:
http://www.rallylights.com/detail.aspx?ID=127
The good thing about these lights, in addition to their OEM quality, is they are sealed units as in they both have lens covers so they can be used as is. They also have mounting brackets which allow them to be adjusted via screws just like OEM units. The caution here is they are not cheap and everything I ordered, including the 4 lights and all needed hardware and brackets will set you back about $1,200. Yes, there are cheaper options but I want to do this right one time and then enjoy.
So, as I am mechanically challenged, I have Kilo Racing doing the fab work and the installation of these. To date, they've modified the control arm mechanisms on the headlight units so they now pop up to the correct height. They have also modified the brackets to fit into the headlight housings and they have test fitted the lights to ensure we're able to complete the conversion. They're now busy on finalizing the installation and adjustment of the lights. The final step in the process will be to have OEM-like shrouds made to complete the conversion and to give it a finished look. We're going to cut up the OEM shroud to reduce its height and then use this as the template for the new shrouds.
A few pics of the lights to date:
Note the lights aren't aimed correctly and also note the 50mm lights will be raised up so the tops of them are in line with the 90mm units.
The project should be done in a few weeks and I'll then post up the results!
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Linear Mode
