Headlight retrofit complete!

[kouki-gymkhana]

After more than a year of planning and fabrication, I finally finished my H9 D2S HID retrofit for my '93 hatch! All I can say is HOLY F@CK! I can see the damn road now! I first tried some of those el cheapo diamond cut H4 housings off of ebay but quickly realized that they suck worse than the stock lights I already had. Last spring, I saw the clearcorners.com H9 kit and fell in love with it but didn't want to spend $1600++ for headlights and I can't take the car to them to have the work done since I'm on the East Coast. Well, I decided to say f@ck it and do it myself and after lots of time, planning, money, and fabrication, the retrofit is complete! I'll post some pics of the new housings and beam patterns when I can borrow a digital cam from my friend.

If you're wondering what was involved in the project, here's a quick list of all the mods it required:--modifying the headlight buckets to fit the Hella units--modifying the Hella H9 halogen units to accept the D2S HID bulbs --fabricating the mounting plate for the low and high beam units--modifying the headlight motors to reduce the pop-up height --fabricating a wiring harness and tapping into the existing headlight wiring--mounting it all up and aiming the lights Obviously, some of these steps were very, very difficult but I think the end result definitely justified the process. It took me a long time to do it because I'm a broke grad student with little free time.

-kouki
Modified by kouki-gymkhana at 10:29 PM 9/22/2004

[Anand]

pics pics pics please

[nightwalker]

ummm... how do we compare if your light upgrade actually made a difference.

[kouki-gymkhana]

Here is a crappy pic with my PDA camera. Better pics are on the way as well as night time pics when I get a better camera.

[Anand]

pickie no workie!

[kouki-gymkhana]

Alright, I'll admit that I'm still a noob when it comes to posting pics (this is actually the first time I'm doing it) so how do I incorporate the pic into the body of the message without making it a link?

[sleepyRPS13]

wow nice job! more front pics pls

[MECPInstaller]

Looks kinda like that eastbear(spelling?) kit mixed with the normal popups, I like it.

[kouki-gymkhana]

Here's another crappy one. I still have some tweaking to do to make it look OEM but I'll get around to it later.

[DammitBobby]

Looks good to me!! Nice job! Need more info on how you did it.

[D1SR240]

looks good man, post more pics, how much did the whole thing cost you?

[Altiman94]

Looks good to me.

[kouki-gymkhana]

Man, I cringe when I tally up the costs but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of $600-700. Steep, I know but when you consider the fact that

1) It's a rare conversion2) I now have HID lighting that's literally 10x better than H4 halogen3) It looks so friggin' cool

it's worth every penny!

As for whether or not I'll be doing a write-up, the answer is "no" for reason #1. No offense but I had to bust my *** to do the necessary research and fabrication and I don't think it'd be fair to just give it away. Sorry, it's a personal thing

I'll post up some night pics with a better camera this weekend.

[w1ngzer0]

I remember a trick on a toyota site using an older BMW's H4's and doing something like that

[ricebike]

nice job! that would be kewl to see in person during a meet...

...but alas, i'm 2 busy for that (being Mr Mom from 530am-7pm & findin a PT job to accomodate wifey's schedule sux).

[kouki-gymkhana]

Here's a few nicer pics with a better camera.

[kouki-gymkhana]

Beam pattern

[Zyphar]

looks nice! good job! wish i could get my hands on something like that...no money tho = \ .

[D1SR240]

nice dude, very nice