Headlight upgrade

[dpbayly]

Ive never been that happy with my stock Halogen headlights and always felt they looked dated.

Well last week I picked up a spare X5 for breaking and a robbed a few bits off it for my self the power fold mirrors and swiches and also the factory Xenon headlights.

They needed a bit of a clean up to bring them back to life which i did with the aid of wet flatting and polishing back up to a shine with a machine polisher.

how they looked before the clean up:



and after:



I then wanted to fit the SMD rings from my Halogen headlights into these new Xenon ones but because there post 2002 the lenses and bonded with a permanent glue instead of the stuff you can heat up so i had the cut the lens off to gain access to the insides:



Once the rings were installed I decided while the lights are apart I would get rid of the orange indicator in the side of the light.

masked up



blown over with satin black:



once this was done i reassembled the lights by gluing and sealing the lenses back in place and where I had cut the lense once installed there is no sign that Ive been anywhere near them with the cutter even with the bonnet up.

Once back together one last thing I changed was to fit a set of 8000K bulbs:



Then refitted the lights back in the car and stand back and admire my work.

Before with the Halogens (tinted with SMD rings)



and now witht he factory Xenons and SMD rings annd 8000K HID bulbs:

[z168]

nice job - do the rings dim when you switch on the headlamps?

[romeokc10]

Nice job, I would have gone with 5000k or 6000k bulbs for more light output, 8000k is too close to having that ricer look, but excellent work nonetheless.

[tmv]

The only thing that I don't like is the 8000K bulb.

[dpbayly]

Originally Posted by z168

nice job - do the rings dim when you switch on the headlamps?

Thanks,

no they don't dim its where the HID's are so bright the camera auto adjust the brightness so they appear dimmer

[dpbayly]

Sorry guys, I love the 8K bulbs have always fitted and upgraded to 8K and love the look, I feel these ones I've fitted don't actually look 8K more like 6K and at night vision is awesome.

[Ricky Bobby]

you do know you could have swapped all internals of the xenon lights into your halogen housings, right?

If you already had bakeable halogens I would have just baked those open and swapped all the xenon stuff into it, would have been less work cutting open the xenon lights and resealing your cuts.

Great job on the satin black signal though, looks nice!

[dpbayly]

Originally Posted by Ricky Bobby

you do know you could have swapped all internals of the xenon lights into your halogen housings, right?

If you already had bakeable halogens I would have just baked those open and swapped all the xenon stuff into it, would have been less work cutting open the xenon lights and resealing your cuts.

Great job on the satin black signal though, looks nice!

Thanks

I didn't know that.... you learn something new every day.

saying that it wouldn't have made a difference to how I did the job because the X5 I got the lights out of I picked up for breaking and I had received a call from a chap who wanted to take the whole car off me and I said I would fit my old lights back in it along with my manual fold mirrors so I didn't have that option of keeping the old units.