As I said in Ramair21's E36 headlight thread, I wanted to make my own thread so that I don't bog his down with stuff.

Right now I'm still undecided whether I want to install these, mainly because I need to cut up the bumper cover to put them in, and so far I'm not convinced that I like their fitment. To put them in so that the lights will shine straight ahead, the glass has to be at too much of an angle for it to look right. If I put the glass at a more asthetically pleasing angle, my headlights will be crosseyed. I think this will be less of an issue once I start re-making half of the headlight assembly, which is going to be necessary anyway, since I'll be cutting away so much of the original assembly.

So anyway, here are some pictures so far. One thing I forgot to do was take some overall pictures of the full assembly. If I think of it, I'll do that next time I'm in the garage.

So, on with the pics:

This is what I'm starting with:


This is the backside of the headlight with the high-beam cap removed. You can also see that the low beam has the wires coming straight out the back of the housing because of the HID conversion:


The headlight is now upside-down, and I've removed the front piece which holds the outer lense, inner lense, angel eyes, and the black cosmetic piece that fills the area around the lenses:


Here's the backside again, with the low-beam cap removed so you can see the backside of the projector. You can also see the mess of wiring. Somewhat visible in the high-beam opening is the white box that holds the resistors for the LED angel eyes. This was just floating around inside. I'll need to find a better solution for that. A lot of this wiring will be cleaned up.


Here's the housing with the projector removed.


Here's the housing with the mounting panel (which still has the high beam reflector attached.


Here's the empty housing sitting in the headlight bucket on the car. The important thing to notice here is the alignment of the low beam hole and the hole in the radiator support. This housing needs to come down quite a bit for the two to be centered, which is what's necessary for the HID projector to fit without cutting the radiator support.


9 image limit. Continued in next post...

 

continued...

Here's the glass (no housing behind it) sitting where I think it needs to be for proper headlight alignment, and also in as close to the original position as possible:




Same thing, but an overhead shot. You can clearly see that it sits real close to the radiator support, plus the angle of the glass is all wonky if I try to make the lights aim properly. This positioning looks dumb.


An overhead shot of the headlight re-positioned in a more asthetically pleasing location, as well as farther forward for radiator support clearance. This position angles the lights in, but I think that I can overcome that by re-positioning the steel plate behind the lenses that actually holds the projector/reflector so that I still get a straight shot with the lights on:


Front shot of the same position. The issue here is that the headlight isn't as wide as the opening, so I need to decide what to do about that. I'm not sure if a simple filler piece will be sufficient yet or not. Fortunately, my black headlight buckets will be more forgiving than somebody who has them painted body-color.


Angel eyes on. In real life, you can easily see the individual LEDs, which I don't like. If I keep the LEDs instead of going with CCFL, I'm going to need to come up with a way to diffuse the light more so you don't see the individual LEDs.



The next step is to start cutting up the headlight housings, but once I do that, I can't re-sell them, so I need to make sure that's what I want to do before I cut.

 

Wow man that looks awesome. Can't wait to see what you do with it.

 

I love all these conversions you guys are doin. I wish someone could do this for me. I'm good at doin body work and paint (things I learn and practice in my collision repair class) I don't really know if I could do something like this myself. Maybe after one of you guys get done you can make a step by step thing so some of us less fabracating inclined people could do this. It looks rely good. Good luck completing it, I love it!

 

I'll probably have a step-by-step account of what I did, but I can already tell that this is no beginner project. This is one of those things that you have to just dive into before you even know if you can do it or not.

 

I can't say that I really like the look, but I'm sure when you're finished it'll look good.

 

Drew, I didn't figure a guy like you would really like it... you and Stu are the two biggest "stock *****" I know. Of course, 99% of the time, I'm the same way. That's why I'm not sure if I really want to do this... I never really had many complaints about how the stock setup looks.

 

It takes a certain amount of bravery to break from the norm. It'll be interesting to see how it looks when it's finished. I'm sure however you finish it will look good.

 

Keep us posted....Looks good. I want to see what you do with rad support/front brace for car structure. Will you have to cut just like he other guy did in the previous thread. That's why im interested. They look sweet but dont want to cut my support. Let us all know Jimmy.
Cheers and good luck. Again they look great.

 

I don't understand why people want this mod!?!?

 

It's a good thing then that's it not up to you TO understand.

 

I'm not cutting the rad support. I'll abandon the project first. I'm going to attempt to modify the lights instead.

 

Thats what i wanted to hear. I feel the same about cutting a non-frame car.
Keep me posted and really do hope it worked out.

 

Ill keep a good eye on this thread.

Tony.

 

Where you guys get these lights from?

 

ebay :P

 

awesome work dude you have rad skills

 

Very nice job bro keep it up!

 

Not a fan of the round lights with how square the rest of a Thirdgen is. I am interested in seeing how it turns out, though.

 

I really like the way these lights look in the pictures at least. That said I did some research on them and it seems its a fairly common mod for the BMW owners to retrofit new hid projectors into them. This is more of an investment obviously but is supposed to give them even better light output without blinding people, and might make it easier to re-aim the low beams at least.

here is a youtube series about the e36 headlights including HID upgrades: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWGNM...eature=related
-It doesn't get very interesting until a little ways into part-4, which is where he talks about retrofitting HID projectors.

now after looking on HIDplanet, I have found you there so I will leave this for everybody else.

~Good luck, hope you go through with it as motivation for me once I get the funds

 

Hey man I think those look really good! Alot of people called me crazy when I wanted to put "circle" headlights on a "box" car. Can you do me a favor and get some measurements on the lights? I may try to put something like this in my DeLorean someday.

 

hey dude stop stocking me

the round lights would certainly bring out your Delorean

 

Thats the way it suppose to be done!

Personally though id use a better projector.Based on the other guys pic the beam was very disapointing.Not any better than the stock halogens & certainly not worth cutting the car up.

 

I pulled the plug on the headlight project. I kept waffling back and forth, trying to convince myself that I liked it. If I had to work that hard to convince myself, then I obviously didn't. I finally came to my senses and realized that cutting up my car, along with a $400 set of headlights to get a look I wasn't even convinced that I liked was dumb.

I'm going to see if I can return the headlights, and if not I'm going to re sell them.

Anybody want to buy a set of headlights?

 

Just do what 84 1LE did to his headlights you might be pleased with that mod instead.

Tony.

 

I'm not too keen on the appearance of projectors in the 4x6 housing. I think I'm going to stick some H4s into some clear housings and call it a day. Now I just need to try and recover the cash I wasted on buying these things.

 

hey jim what do you think about the silverado conversion https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/memb...light-mod.html

 

im pretty sure you can sale those things to some BMW guy. But like i said before you had to be committed to it from the beginning. Sorry it didnt work out bro!

 

I don't like it at all.

 

To much cutting for me. I know I sounded like I really wanted to do this on the other thread but looking at it now not conviced. I mean they look great and everything but i'll just stick with the regular aftermaret ones.

Tony.

 

I didnt expect everyone to do this mod. Yeah it looks cool but there is a lot of cutting you have to do. I am working on making the core support more durable. Ive check the car the other day for any stress cracks. i could not find anything bad. but i do have an idea for the support ordeal. I love the look of my car now. i mostly did it just for looks since i dont drive the car everyday. i know some of you do drive your cars every day so this mod is worth looking at every direction to do this. I dont blame you.

Good luck to anyone that does this.

Joey J.

 

With cutting and trimming those lights could look good. But I agree that if you have to amp yourself up to liking them, then you'd probably regret triming the core support to fit.

Wasn't there someone who put celebrity headlights in a camaro? Do they make those "diamond cut" headlights for celebrities? Could be easy to mount a real HID projector in a celebrity housing...

 

niiiice im doing it too haha but im adding turn signal on the headlight





and im considering doing the red

 

Thanks, Jim! You might have changed my mind on doing this mod! 5 mins ago I was all gung ho, then I read your thread...

Would you think that you could cut enough material off the light housing itself in order to aim the lights correctly, resulting in not removing the core support?

I'm not opposed to doing all the trimming to the lights...just not the car. The 4x6 halo lights are definitely a good looking alternate plan, tho!!! Thanks for the legwork Jim!

 

I was wondering if you placed the lights in as shown below but separated the glass from the housing and repositioned it as seen in the second picture. You would then have to make up an extension on the housing.











Maybe mock it up and snap a picture for fun...

 

Yeah, I'm confident that you can trim away enough of the headlight housing to avoid cutting the core support. What you can't avoid cutting, is the headlight buckets, which is why I ultimately backed out of the project.

The only difficult aspect of this installation that I saw was fabbing up mounts to hold the lights in place. Making some mickey-mouse mounts from misc parts wouldn't be hard, but making it look like a nice clean, OEM installation would take some work.

That plastic is molded directly to the glass lense. You could remove it, but it would most likely leave battle scars. You'd have to make a whole new mounting scheme for the projector/reflector too... and if you're going to go that far, you might as well go a little farther and start from scratch and mold your own crap instead of playing with the existing stuff. If I ever decide to revisit this project, that's the approach that I'll most likely take. I'll start with flat glass lenses and mold my own lense housings from fiberglass. Ultimately it's the only way to make it look like it belongs there as far as I'm concerned.

 

 

post some improvement

 

Watching this thread, I really like the look of these lights! Good work!

 

lol..like how this thread got jackd? xD
Mikey

 

Jim is this still in the "scrapped project" bin??? How hard was it to remove the innards to the E36 headlights? I might have an idea that might work, but would still require quite a bit of fabrication with fiberglass and lexan/glass. I thought about removing the innards, getting them in place where you need them, still retaining their adjustment mechanics if possible, molding some fiberglass around them with mounting points into the fiberglass and then figuring something out for the glass part on the front if I still wasn't happy with the originals.

 

For now it's still in the "scrapped" bin, but the euro-style H4 housings that I wound up installing are garbage, so I'm starting to rethink this to some extent.

The E36 headlights completely dis-assemble without much difficulty. The main issue with cutting up the lights is that you're going to need to re-design the headlight aiming mechanism because in it's current configuration, the threaded screws extend all the way to the back of the housing. Your idea is very similar to what I determined would be required to use these without cutting up the body, but ultimately I decided that it would still be necessary to cut up the urethane bumper in order to make room for the glass. Once I realized that, I more or less decided that if I do anything like this, I might as well just start from scratch.

 

Anyone happen to know the diameter of the light reflectors? just the part, making something to fit in that spot won't be a problem....as long as the lights themselves are small enough for i'm thinking of doing.

 

Any more updates on this?

 

i saw ramair21's (i think thats his s/n) thread. and i was that he cut the core support. if you did it the way he did, couldnt you just simply box in the area that was cut to keep it rigid? BTW i am kinda new to fabbing stuff, so this was just a thought. by the looks of his pics, it looks like you could box it in with out an issue...

 

lets see some pictures of the aftermath on the radiator support, think this conversion is awesome. but so don't like cutting up a good rad support!

 

I just bought the euro style e36 lights with CCFL angel eyes. I could easily modify the e36 housings to minimize any cutting of the core support. However, I don't know if cutting any material from the bottom of the hood is absolutely required?

Can anyone who's done this mod shed a little light?

 

Has anyone installed these without cutting on the factory hood?

 

I DID HARLDLY ANY CUTTING!..my cousin made some brackets and it worked all well will post pics in a bit

 

Please post pics! Top view of light housings with the hood up would be cool.