Hey 1 addicts,
1 YEAR UPDATE: No water ingress, high beam functional, angel eyes have had 0 problems, fully functional. Drove next to a 335i (F30) with the LED headlight option, the LEDs appear whiter but mine project light wider and further. Still a head-turner.
I just uploaded my album of all the pictures I took during my HID retrofit process. I will be updating this thread as often as possible as it was about two weeks worth of work that was put into this project. I would like to share with you my journey in making this headlight dream of mine come true!
If you contemplate doing this as a project, feel free to pm me and we can also exchange phone numbers to get in touch with me faster for those questions/problems that need a quick answer.
There was always something I never liked about our generation headlights, the halogens were not good enough for me and the xenons I felt just wasn't me. Could I have gotten used headlights on eBay and changed the AE's to Lux...yeah sure, but I wanted something better. I knew I could do it, but I didn't know how yet.
So I started doing some research at
hidplanet.com and talked back and forth to
theretrofitsource.com about what my capabilities were. I have the LCI headlights and currently there was no LED strip on the market until I heard from the retrofit source that they were going to produce one. At that moment, I knew this had to be done.
So I started doing some initial measurements, as best I could, on this little sunshine:
I measured the diameter of the low beam and the high beams for my angel eyes and the length of the vacant strip for my LED strip.
I happened upon a group buy during that time and ordered right away from TRS (The Retrofit Source) and bought:
Bi-xenon FX-R Stage III Kit with 100mm angel eye rings, Iris shrouds and Morimoto 35W 5000K HID bulbs.
I added on the 80mm angel eyes onto the order. And so the wait began for my LED strips to come out for the eyebrow. It was nearly a 2 month wait and received them end of April
So when the day finally came where my parents went on their 25 anniversary trip I went into the garage and began my project, in secret.
The first night, I came home from work at 8pm and immediately took the battery from the tractor that we use to mow the lawn and connected it to my ballast which will power the HID bulb.
The HID bulb was inserted into the projector, and then there was light!
I wonder what my neighbour's were thinking when I had this running near midnight haha. That was the end of the first night, I went to bed excited and extremely nervous for what was to happen the next morning.