Got started on the Euro lights yesterday. I used
this thread as a go-by. As noted, the front bumper needs to come off for this install. Here's one final "before" pic before I got to work:
Bumper removal is fairly straightforward; it's more time-consuming than difficult. Of course, much peace of mind was provided by the fact that I'm having a brand new bumper fitted next week, so even if I totally botched the job it wouldn't have been too big of a deal. Here's the bumper fully off:
Next, the headlights had to come out. Very finicky suckers! There are six bolts that need to come out, and only a couple of them are easy to get to. Even once all the bolts securing the lamp are removed, it takes some maneuvering to get into or out of place. Here it is with the first headlamp removed:
Next you need to swap bulbs and ballast over from the old headlamp to the new. Actually, the only bulbs I needed to transfer were the xenon bulb and the turn signal bulb, as the new units shipped with both the H3 cornering light bulb and H8 angel eye bulb pre-installed, which I wasn't expecting. I actually went ahead and purchased some PIAA Stratos Blue H8's a few weeks ago. Normally I'm not an aftermarket bulb-type of guy, but I wanted the angel eyes to more closely match the LED eyebrow, and from what I've read 5000 Kelvin appears to be a pretty good matching color temperature. These bulbs are from PIAA Japan, found on eBay:
Speaking of the LED eyebrows, my pre-LCI car is not wired for them, so I had to do a bit of extra work, tapping a new wire to power the LED into the wire that powers the angel eyes per
this thread. Unfortunately, I purchased the wrong wiring harness and I couldn't get the pin to seat all the way into the connector, and my soldering wasn't so great, either, so I could never get the brows to light up. So I'm going to purchase the (much cheaper) proper wire
here,
[EDIT - actually, per another member, these are NOT the correct wires, but can be made to work with some modification] and have a go at trying to get the wiring done at some point in the future (probably when I can't stand to look at un-illuminated eyebrows any longer, LOL).
Anyway, I was getting pretty frustrated with the whole thing, and finally decided to get the car put back together as is. Here it is as it sits this AM:
I feel like some of the panel gaps are a little wonky, as I rushed to get everything put back together. Like I said, it doesn't really matter, because a brand new bumper will be getting put on next week at a BMW body shop. I think I'll also have them confirm placement of the lights as well, since if you look really closely the left side looks a little lower; they're going to have the bumper off anyway, so it should be no problem for them to take a look at the positioning of the lights.
One more thing: you may notice in the second-to-last pic that the corners still have quite a bit of amber in them - this is because the amber bulbs reflect like crazy off of the headlamp housing (as they are designed to do, obviously). I didn't realize that, in Europe, BMW uses chromed bulbs to conceal the amber when the bulbs aren't in use. So I ordered a couple of
those from ECS as well. Luckily, they install very easily through the wheel wells.