For Blackers10... and anyone else interested in HID upgrade

[Bushbasher]

Ok, the HIDs' are fitted to the 'lane and it was a relatively painless exercise but before I spell out the "how to" just let me first apologise for the crap pics, they're from my phone as the camera is AWOL for some reason and as soon as I track it down I'll take a night time pic of the light spread.

I picked up a set of 55w HID H7s' off Ebay for all of $220 delivered, I could have gone for the 35W units cheaper but lets face it, why go 3x when you can have 5x brightness, haha.

After looking around the engine bay for a suitable spot to put the ballasts ( which are about the size of a 50pk of smokes) I decided there was nowhere suitable so mounted them behind the grill






..running the leads through the gap between the radiator and the adjoining support section,




The ballasts are weatherproof and the instructions say to avoid putting them near any heat so behind the grill works on both accounts.
Holding a regular H7 up next to the H7 HID the fillament in the regular globe and the little "blister" inside the HID globe where the light source is generated are in exactly the same place so hopefully the focus on the lense will still be ok and give good penetration as well as lighting up everything either side of the car.

The globes come with their own wiring and plug as well as rubber seal.



so to get them to seal into the housing I had to cut a hole in the rubber boot on the back of the light and fit the seal into it,







All rather neat and it looks good I think. The only glitch in whole setup is that the power lead and plug for the high beams are actually inside the housing of the light and short of dismantling the light to get the wires out the only thing I could do to get to the original light plug was pull it out through the boot hole and fold the wire back over the rim of the hole and refit the rubber boot over the protruding wires so the plug is accessable to plug the ballast into.
So the whole thing goes - Original high beam plug -> ballast power supply cable -> Ballast -> power out to HID globe plugs -> HID globe. The only tricky ( sort of ) thing was because the globe has it's own wiring loom/seal/plugs I had to feed the wires/plugs/seal through the globe retaining clip on the back of the light then fit the seal to the rubber boot all in that little space behind the air box on the left and battery on the right. A bit of a tight squeeze for my ham fists but accomplished without losing any bark so all is good.

The only other thing of note is that because of the generic nature of the kit the 2 spade connectors on the ballast power supply cable that plug into the original high beam plug are just out there in the breeze and can be put on back to front if you're not careful thus making the whole system inoperable till you make sure it's all positive to positive all the way down the line on both sides.

So there it is, all done in about half an hour once I decided where to put the ballasts. I'll add a night pic of the lights in action as soon as I track down the camera.... hopefully tonight .

Cheers
Bushbasher