2003 BJII J48 Astina Lighting upgrades

[Big Damo]

Hey guys, this is mainly just a thread about the HID conversion I have been working on for the old mans car, unfortunately I only have pictures of the end result as we didn't take photos during the conversion.

The run down was I contacted Rupe here on the forum (or he contacted me telling me he had new headlight assemblies in stock) and I showed some interest, I found out he had new factory OEM HID assemblies from the JDM cars, complete with ballasts, no wiring though, but we sorted that out eventually.

The problem I was facing is that our 323 only had a single H4 in either headlight assembly, the new assemblies where a twin headlight design, they have D2R globes for the low beams, powered by the ballast, and the highbeams where in a separate reflector next to the low beams, which are HB3 (9005) 60W globes.

Here are the new assemblies (pics by Rupe, credit to him):












Now not only did I have a wiring issue on my hands, but also an issue with globes, I needed HIDs (and not a dodgy aftermarket plug and play bulb either), I needed proper D2R globes, so I searched around and came across these:

http://www.powerbulbs.com/product/xe...nse-d2r-single

They cost me about $108 AUD each, so $216 just for the low beams, for the high beams I got these:

http://www.powerbulbs.com/product/ni...9005-twin-pack

Around $58 for these, but they came in a pack of two, good deal!

Now, while waiting for the globes, I needed new connectors for the high beams, so I got my ass down to JAS Oceania in Tullamarine, they sell EVERYTHING auto electrical, they had some female 9005 connectors, got a hold of those.

Now I had a big problem finding the wiring for the ballasts, after a few weeks of searching around, I found someone in Indonesia who had the connectors for the OEM Mitsubishi ballasts, unfortunately at the time I didn't have Paypal, so to send $25 AUD it cost me another $20 on top through Western Union, being the biggest scamming joint around I was sus, but relieved when within the week a fedex package arrived for me with my expensive 4 wires in it. All it does it plugs into the ballast for power.

Now we had a wiring job ahead of us, we probed the connector with a test light, and found out that when high beam is on the low beam still has power to its pin on the connector which is odd a H4 system, I think because our 323 switches the earth instead of power to change usually low beam goes off when high comes on, which would have created a big issue for us when we turned on the high beam because ballasts would lose power and then when they come back on they have a warm up time before they get to 100% brightness.

We added a new fuse box on the side of the battery tray, with 3 fuses, the power from the battery goes to one side of the fuses, on the other side of the fuses you had them going to pin 30s on the three relays, so we have three fuses, one for ballasts (low beams), one for high beams, and one for driving lights, unfortunately with this setup if the low beam fuse blows we're going to lose both low beams because they're only on one relay.

What we did was used the factory H4 connector, spliced off the low beam wire to energise a twin output relay, to power the ballasts, what a relay does is uses a small amount of current to pull down a contact, to join its pins 30 (fused battery power) to its output on both pins 87.

The high beam wire also had to have a relay wired into it because its a different type of globe and connector, so same deal there.

We also wired up another relay off the high beam wire for an output for driving lights which I had planned, but we didn't have enough time to screw around mounting the little alloy light bar, it looks to be a massive pain in the ass job because of the layout of the front bar, but anything is possible.

The front bar had to come off the car to get out the old assemblies out, in hindsight I also should have bought some new fog lights as well as one is smashed and it would have been ideal to replace them both while the bar was off. The new assemblies just fit straight in, we connected the ballasts power to pins 87 on the new low beam relay, earthed them to the body, the high beam relay, from pins 87 we soldered on the new connectors and again earthed them to the body.

This is the end result, I could lift the lights up a bit higher (going off my LV Focus and WS Fiesta lights against the garage door, they're probably about 20cm higher) but here is the result, we've got a fairly clean cut-off, there is a slight bit of glare but no way near as bad as an aftermarket kit.







It looks much better IRL, I'm a **** photographer unfortunately, put the camera on auto and let it do its own thing. That odd faint glarey light is the parker globes, they're in the HID reflector, bad design.

Next time I do a job like this I'm going to stick with 4300K Phillips OEM globes rather than 5000K OSRAM ones, I prefer the yellow look rather than the white, 6000K is too blue and looks a bit wanky.

The good thing is if the car is defected, we only spliced off the factory H4 wiring, so if needs be, we can put the old assemblies back in to the factory H4 connector and we have ourselves back to factory no issue for a roadworthy, the only thing that might seem sus is the extra fuse panel and 3 extra relays lying about.

The assemblies are OEM, they're from the JDM versions of our cars, I wanted to go the legit way rather than cheap plug and play HID kit on the factory halogen reflectors so I don't blind people on the road with bad glare and attract negative attention from police, last thing we want is our main bread winner's car off the road. I've done about 500km worth of night driving with the old man behind me in his car to test, and they don't annoy the cars in front of you or on coming traffic because of the sharp cut-off, I found the old halogens are actually worse. We do lots and lots of night driving in the country, its better to spend around $1000 on lights rather than go through the hassle of the car being off the road because you hit a Kangaroo/Horse coming home late at night and dealing with the Nazi's at the insurance company.

All up, it cost:

Around $260 for the assemblies from Rupe
$216 for the low beams
$58 for the high beam globes
$45 for the ballast wires
$85 for the relays, relay holders, fuse block and an alloy light bar
$40 for a bottle of tequila for a mate who helped me out a lot.
$127 for a set of 100W Hella Comet 500 driving lights which arent on the car YET.

Wiring and split tubing was free, work "donated" it to us LOL.

$831 total.

[TheMAN]

very nice mate! finally I get to see the beam pattern of the OEM HID headlights!
there is a rarer version of this light in black housing off of the 2003 special edition sport20

the low beam performance seems decent, but it's too bad the high beams are the rubbish HB2 bulbs... if you baked your headlights and swapped the high beam reflectors over from the normal sport20/sp20 halogen housings, you get to have the much better H1 high beams

oh and if you looked for a headlight leveling switch off of the early mazda6, it will work with those lights

[Big Damo]

Thanks for the reply, unfortunately they are HB3s, H1s are much better but if i was to bake the headlights, I'd have probably done it to the stock ones and retrofitted FX-R bixenon projectors instead.

I still have a set of Hella Comet 500 driving lights here waiting to go onto the car to fix the high beam issue

[TheMAN]

oops, I meant HB3, not HB2... stupid typo
if you don't want to do anything to the lights, I recommend fitting in HIR1 bulbs... they are a common upgrade here in the States and those HIR1 bulbs actually have the same bayonet base as the HB3 bulbs, so it fits and are much more powerful... somebody in the design committee goofed!

[Big Damo]

VERY INTERESTING!

Thanks much for that, I guess that is now on the cards, HIR1 hey, gotta get me some of these, 2500 lumens, I like the sound of that.

http://forums.nasioc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=954736

and

http://shnu.us/HIR%20Trimming%20Stock.htm