The headlights on the legacy blow goats. Have proof.
It's separate high and low beam bulbs.
I'm thinking of a small bi-xenon projector with 55 watt hid to replace the low beam and keeping the high beam capsule bulb.
Looking to do this on the cheap. EBay or junkyard.
What do I need to know? How do these things mount? What's the best ng for the buck? I'm seeing h1 bi-xenon projector setups for 50 on ebay....
I don't really understand how these things go together, but I do know that the first gen TSX has spectacularly good HID optics and that people have successfully retrofit them into Impreza / WRX housings.
I'm seeing retrofit projectors on the retrofit source cheaper than ebay. Can't find any bad press on these guys, but the options are staggering. And confusing.
Let's set a budget of 75 for just the projectors and housing mods. Not to include bulbs and ballast, as depending upon what I get, I Amy already have them.
Dusterbd13 wrote: I'm seeing retrofit projectors on the retrofit source cheaper than ebay. Can't find any bad press on these guys, but the options are staggering. And confusing. Let's set a budget of 75 for just the projectors and housing mods. Not to include bulbs and ballast, as depending upon what I get, I Amy already have them.
Yeah, I looked into this a few years ago for my truck and ended up giving up in utter confusion and just putting some LED driving lights on the thing.
Ill reply after work this afternoon.
NC Miatas have very excellent low beam projectors
1kris06 wrote: Ill reply after work this afternoon.
Looking forward to it.
And thanks guys.
I have done a few projector retrofits using parts from The Retrofit Source. TRS was great to work with, in my experience. They do have some how-to videos explaining what exactly you have to do. There are a lot of choices because there are tradeoffs between different projector capsules - these generally surround sharpness of cutoff, color of cutoff, even color, beam width, stepped or ramped cutoffs, mounting, and overall projector size.
To fit the projector, you will generally end up baking the light to get the lens off, then cutting a hole in the existing reflector such that the projector capsule can be epoxied in its place. The putty-style epoxy works well for this. There are also a few retrofits that use a plate that mimics the stock bulb base. this plate is keyed to the projector housing, and a big nut threads on the back to clamp it all to the existing hole in the reflector. I did one like this, but the plastic reflector eventually cracked and failed due to the cantilevered weight and excess vibration of off road use.
It all depends on what the internals of your headlight looks like. You either have reflector bowls or projector halogen. Take the 1st gen mazda 6 as an example.
The light closest to the center of the car is the high beam and is a reflector type light. The light closest to the outside is a projector.
If you have a reflector type light, what you need to do in a nutshell;
Open up your headlight and remove the lens
Cut out the back of the bowl so the projector can contact the bowl where you want to attach the projector. With a combination of screws and JB Weld.
Something like this:
Otherwise, If you're lucky like me. theretrofitsource has a complete kit for your vehicle and all you do is open your headlights and swap out the projectors.
If they don't have a kit for you, its fairly easy to make your own brackets. In my case, the 2nd time I had some help and what we came up with was 2 'c' shaped brackets that screw into the OEM bracket, and then those brackets get screwed together, going through holes in the HID projector.
The orange bracket in this picture snaps into my headlight and is then adjustable.
Thats a really condensed version, but it should give you an insight.
Dusterbd13 wrote: I'm seeing retrofit projectors on the retrofit source cheaper than ebay. Can't find any bad press on these guys, but the options are staggering. And confusing. Let's set a budget of 75 for just the projectors and housing mods. Not to include bulbs and ballast, as depending upon what I get, I Amy already have them.
With a budget of 75, you aren't going to have any quality options. I wouldn't trust any ebay projectors unless they are OEM take offs, even then, I'd go through TRS. I also would buy a spare headlight, but thats just me. If this isn't your daily, you could always buy another headlight if you screw something up beyond repair. The easy button would be to buy the TRS morimoto mini H1 or D2S projectors (depending what bulbs you have laying around), but thats already almost double your budget in just the projectors.
they make versions that screw/thread right into the bulb hole of your existing reflectors now, with zero cutting of the reflector bowl (or a very minor grinding at most, and you still need to bake or heat-gun the lens off the front of the headlight of course). There is a threaded collar that goes on the rear and locks the projector into place.
I did mine the old way a few years ago, cutting up my 04 WRX bowls and hacking together my own version with TSX projectors. it's messy, and the front looks a little industrial, but I kind of like the look.
Mine aren't aimed perfectly with the high-beams either, but bixenon would have solved that back then too.
I'm okay with the results, but I think that the screw in version is much easier.
I bought some of the screwn-in eBay (or could have been Amazon) bixenons for my 2000 Impreza RS coupe (because the headlights aren't super amazing), but haven't installed them yet. I went the cheap route on those, because knock-offs are supposedly not bad now, and the whole thing with bixenons, plug-and-play harness for my bulb type and cheapo ballasts (which I've used before with no problems), set me back under $100 if I remember. I bought them over the summer and just haven't gotten around to it yet.
The harness seems really convenient though, since my RS uses one bulb for low and high beams... so the harness takes the high beam wire and connects it appropriately to the bixenon flipper, so I don't have to figure any of that out myself :D
Worst-case, a ballast goes, and I buy another cheap one for $20, and take 5 minutes to swap it out.
You'll need to log in to post.
