At this point I was about 4 days into this project. That damn perma-seal took me forever to figure only for me to end up cutting the lens around the border. After getting projector fixed down it was time to add the angel eyes.
For some reason I was being dumb at this stage. I used caulk
to hold them down as is shown:
So here I am, holding the angel eyes in place for an hour like an idiot. I gave up on this method and removed the caulk that I had applied, a painstaking process. At that point I youtube'd a video on how to hold them in place without using an adhesive. My research led me to this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywW5ZMXPBZ0
When I saw this video at midnight in bed, I was struck by how simple it was. I slept another restless night and enduring another day at work, waiting until I could work on these bad boys again.
When I got home after work, I began immediately. This was my result:
This got me thinking, if this technique worked so well with the angel eyes, why can't I do the same for my shroud that will cover the projector. So I planned it out in my head and everything clicked. I went for it!
I drilled about 5-6 holes on the innards of the shroud where the 28 gauge wire would pass through. I drilled 4-5 holes on the actual reflector so i could wrap and tighten the wires that hold the shroud in place.
When that was done I drilled four holes on the shroud for the wires to hold the second pair of angel eyes down. I put this together and put the housing and lens back on to see what it would really look like:
I was ecstatic! The housing and the eyebrow hid the top of the angel eyes where the positive and negative wires feed in to the circuit. Not only that but the housing was so tight you couldn't see any of the 28 gauge wires that held the shroud in place!
I used the same technique immediately on the eyebrow. Which was disappointing to me. It was crooked. The eyebrow is not as straight a line as I thought it would be. I will let the picture do the talking...
After I was finished putting the eyebrow and the housing back together (Read: Not the lens yet) I began with the wiring. This was fun for me. I was coming to a close on the first headlight!
I did not want DRL angel eyes, thought it would be too flashy for my taste so I decided to tie my low beams to my angel eyes and eyebrow. This was simple, all the red wires are tied together and all the black wires are tied together. I soldered the connections and attached them to the connectors that TRS provided me.
In this picture you can see that the angel eyes and eyebrow are tied together. Each pair (2 in total) would connect to their respective end of their splitters.
What you can't see is how I connected my high beams to my solenoid to activate the shutter to enable high beams on my bi-xenon connector. I did this by cutting the high beam purple (positive) and brown (ground) and splicing one end of each to the solenoid wires. The solenoid wires have no polarity so it doesn't matter on the FX-R projectors. So when power is sent to high beam bulb, the solenoid actuates the shutter and BOOM...DOUBLE HIGH BEAMS BITCH!
I'll explain this part as best I can, until I draw up a circuit to visually see what I mean. The positive and negative of the low beam are connected to a special circuit. BMW uses CANBUS, which you can read here
http://www.theretrofitsource.com/trs..._harnesses.php or google. Basically, you can't tap into the +12V post becauses everytime you turn on your low-beams, the car will not sense the voltage going into the low beam (Because you disabled that option). Instead TRS put together a circuit of a relay, fuse, resistor and capacitor. The resistor is used to fool the car thinking that there actually is a bulb there. The capacitor is used in reference to ground to allow current to continuously flow through while the ballast is initially powered. At first, there is not enough voltage charged up so it needs the current in the beginning, by the time it reaches its fifth time constant the current tapers off and the ballast becomes powered solely by the voltage being provided from the low beam.
Anyways, sorry for the digression, the other end of the CANBUS connects to splitters. One end connects to the CANBUS trickery device, one end connects to the angel eyes + eyebrow, and the last end connects to the ballast which ignites the xenons.
Here is the plug that connects to my D2S bulbs
At this point I ran into a problem. The plug for the HID bulb stuck out too much to reattach the back cover. So my nifty solution was to cut a hole on the back cover. One hole to fit the plug, and the other to feed the plug and wires through. TRS provided a gasket for the hole that feeds wires and plug through.
You can see I outsmarted my plug problem by taking some ABS plastic. Cutting and then bending it into shape then siliconing it down.
Finally I began reassembly. And for those who don't know, Goo Gone followed by an IPA/Water mixture does wonders on cleaning chrome.
Since I cut the housing tabs off, I used JB weld to cold-weld them back on, after that cured I siliconed the lens back on and clamped it down.
Assembled in, and done with headlight number 1!
