My Super Clean 98+ BLS HID Installation
02-13-2011, 08:08 PM
#1
My Super Clean 98+ BLS HID Installation Here's a little background on my 98+ BLS premium kit installation. I purchased the kit a long.... time ago and recieved it around May of last year. My car hasn't run now since June 3rd of 2007 and I've had a lot of problems that have inhibited me from working on it. I've finally gotten around to being consistently working on the car and everything I've done up to this point has either revolved around rewiring the car or cleaning things up under the engine bay. There is a complete build thread in my signature that details all of the work up to this point in time.
I split up the installation of the kit over three days. The first day was getting all of the old stuff out of the way, assembling the new projectors, and twiddling with the wiring. The second day was all of the wiring and the third was getting the new lights in the car.
Day 1... I took a couple before pictures of the OEM lights for future comparison sake. My car unless I push it doesn't move so the after pictures will be same spot.
Here are the lows:
Highs:
Once those were taken I started pulling everything apart. In the beginning I just removed the passenger side and then went back to the drivers. It would be easier to pull them all at once. Out:
Here's the projectors in the process of assembly:
I had a couple questions for Brian at BLS and shot him an email. It ended up that my thinking was correct and the lock washers still go on the high beams. Pictured:
After that I just kept plugging away and eventually got all of the projectors together:
With that out of the way the next major task was getting all of the wiring for the kit in the car. The major part of the wiring:
I checked out the installation CD and saw that I didn't really like the way the wiring was run. With my relocated fuse boxes and engine covers I'd have wiring all over the place. I started thinking about mounting the harness beneath the drivers headlight. I got the harness in there and twiddled with it a little before I decided I needed to go to sleep.
More...
I split up the installation of the kit over three days. The first day was getting all of the old stuff out of the way, assembling the new projectors, and twiddling with the wiring. The second day was all of the wiring and the third was getting the new lights in the car.
Day 1... I took a couple before pictures of the OEM lights for future comparison sake. My car unless I push it doesn't move so the after pictures will be same spot.
Here are the lows:
Highs:
Once those were taken I started pulling everything apart. In the beginning I just removed the passenger side and then went back to the drivers. It would be easier to pull them all at once. Out:
Here's the projectors in the process of assembly:
I had a couple questions for Brian at BLS and shot him an email. It ended up that my thinking was correct and the lock washers still go on the high beams. Pictured:
After that I just kept plugging away and eventually got all of the projectors together:
With that out of the way the next major task was getting all of the wiring for the kit in the car. The major part of the wiring:
I checked out the installation CD and saw that I didn't really like the way the wiring was run. With my relocated fuse boxes and engine covers I'd have wiring all over the place. I started thinking about mounting the harness beneath the drivers headlight. I got the harness in there and twiddled with it a little before I decided I needed to go to sleep.
More...
02-13-2011, 08:09 PM
#2
Day 2... I picked up right where I left off and spent all night getting the wiring in the car the way I wanted it. The first thing I did was clip the extra wiring off of the HID bulbs. They come with an extra connector that you can use if you're not going to use the BLS harness. I'm not a big fan of extra wiring and weight conscious so in came the wire cutters:
The next step may sound a little odd for working on your headlights, but I jacked up the car and removed the drivers front wheel. I was trying to drill a self tapping screw into the frame through the open head light area and
/ getting angry / wasting time. You can see the small self tapping screw in the radiator support. There was already an existing hole there that was smaller than the OD of the screw so I just decided to go ahead and use it:
While I was in that area I kept knocking my arm against this damn extra part of the front bumper / fender connector plate. What the hell is this thing sticking out?
I'm thinking about cutting it flat once I pull the front bumper off for some
/ cutting / 
Here is the bottom view of the relay mounted:
This is the top view of the same thing. You can see two of the wires running through the top part of the radiator support. Those are the power and ground wires:
Power and ground:
The ground wire is further away and the power is closer.
Once those were in I found a nice out of the way place to mount the ballasts. Most people from what I have seen so far like to mount them inside of the front bumper support. That's all fine except I plan on removing mine and installing a new setup made out of aluminum. With that option removed I decided to mount the ballast right around the relay on the frame rail. The first time I mounted it I wasn't too happy with the size of the velcro supplied with the kit. I kind of installed it off center and once I stuck the ballast it would rock and potentially make a rattling sound. I don't know if driving the car I would be able to hear it or not so I nixed it anyways. I had some larger velcro that I bought a while ago for my passenger side wiring tuck. Much larger:
I then stuck the whole piece to the car even though it was longer than the ballast. The thing is rock solid and not even remotely going to go anywhere:
Once that was mounted I jammed the rest of the wiring for the passenger side between the radiator shrouding and the wiper fluid bottle. It was a pain in the *** to fit it through there with the connectors, but after some choice words got it through there. I taped it all up to the OEM wiring as much as I could. You can barely see the ends where it runs over the frame rails, but that was impossible to avoid. I had to pull the washer bottle out a little to give myself some more space, but here it is:
Over the passenger side frame rail:
I was planning on mounting the ballast for the passenger side in the same spot as the drivers side, but the horn was in the way. Normally, that would mean it goes in the garbage pile, but I need the horn for those choice 3 honking moments. Instead I decided to make a new bracket to mount the horn out of the way. Anyone remember this old piece of aluminum from a couple weeks ago?
Well, as sure as I thought I was able to turn around and use it. I drilled a couple holes through it as well as my thumb. ouch... Mounted:
Despite it being late I decided to break out the impact on this one. I wasn't going to sit there for 20 minutes trying to tighten it down in a small space like that.
Once the horn was out of the way I mounted the ballast with both pieces of velcro supplied in the BLS kit, zip tied part of the low beam wiring to the horn, and plugged in the high beam adapters. Here's the passenger side all wrapped up:
Driver side all wrapped up. I added a zip tie to the relay. I would hate for that to come unplugged when I was driving for some odd reason:
I went though all of this work for the main reason of keeping everything out of sight and here's the finished wiring. Everything fits beneath my driver side cover and the ground wire will be beneath the lid holder once it is bolted down keeping all of the wiring hidden:
More...
The next step may sound a little odd for working on your headlights, but I jacked up the car and removed the drivers front wheel. I was trying to drill a self tapping screw into the frame through the open head light area and
/ getting angry / wasting time. You can see the small self tapping screw in the radiator support. There was already an existing hole there that was smaller than the OD of the screw so I just decided to go ahead and use it:While I was in that area I kept knocking my arm against this damn extra part of the front bumper / fender connector plate. What the hell is this thing sticking out?
I'm thinking about cutting it flat once I pull the front bumper off for some
/ cutting / Here is the bottom view of the relay mounted:
This is the top view of the same thing. You can see two of the wires running through the top part of the radiator support. Those are the power and ground wires:
Power and ground:
The ground wire is further away and the power is closer.
Once those were in I found a nice out of the way place to mount the ballasts. Most people from what I have seen so far like to mount them inside of the front bumper support. That's all fine except I plan on removing mine and installing a new setup made out of aluminum. With that option removed I decided to mount the ballast right around the relay on the frame rail. The first time I mounted it I wasn't too happy with the size of the velcro supplied with the kit. I kind of installed it off center and once I stuck the ballast it would rock and potentially make a rattling sound. I don't know if driving the car I would be able to hear it or not so I nixed it anyways. I had some larger velcro that I bought a while ago for my passenger side wiring tuck. Much larger:
I then stuck the whole piece to the car even though it was longer than the ballast. The thing is rock solid and not even remotely going to go anywhere:
Once that was mounted I jammed the rest of the wiring for the passenger side between the radiator shrouding and the wiper fluid bottle. It was a pain in the *** to fit it through there with the connectors, but after some choice words got it through there. I taped it all up to the OEM wiring as much as I could. You can barely see the ends where it runs over the frame rails, but that was impossible to avoid. I had to pull the washer bottle out a little to give myself some more space, but here it is:
Over the passenger side frame rail:
I was planning on mounting the ballast for the passenger side in the same spot as the drivers side, but the horn was in the way. Normally, that would mean it goes in the garbage pile, but I need the horn for those choice 3 honking moments. Instead I decided to make a new bracket to mount the horn out of the way. Anyone remember this old piece of aluminum from a couple weeks ago?
Well, as sure as I thought I was able to turn around and use it. I drilled a couple holes through it as well as my thumb. ouch... Mounted:
Despite it being late I decided to break out the impact on this one. I wasn't going to sit there for 20 minutes trying to tighten it down in a small space like that.
Once the horn was out of the way I mounted the ballast with both pieces of velcro supplied in the BLS kit, zip tied part of the low beam wiring to the horn, and plugged in the high beam adapters. Here's the passenger side all wrapped up:
Driver side all wrapped up. I added a zip tie to the relay. I would hate for that to come unplugged when I was driving for some odd reason:
I went though all of this work for the main reason of keeping everything out of sight and here's the finished wiring. Everything fits beneath my driver side cover and the ground wire will be beneath the lid holder once it is bolted down keeping all of the wiring hidden:
More...
02-13-2011, 08:12 PM
#3
Day 3 With the projectors all assembled and the wiring in the car all I had left to do was mount the hardware and set the cutoff. I had a couple hours before I had my BJJ class so I decided to get the projectors mounted in the car and wired for power. The funny thing about working on cars is that after some time you should come to expect the easiest things to be not so easy and potentially a total pain in the *** taking way more time than you expected.
The first step of mounting the projectors is to slide a 10/24ths flat washer over the oem adjustment bolt. You'd think that should take less than a second to slide a washer over a bolt. For some odd reason the ID of the washer wasn't the same on all of the washers. On exaclty half of them it was off just a little tiny bit, but it was enough to cause it to not want to go over the bolt. You can see in this picture how the washer has removed a layer of material from every thread that it has passed over.
On the first one (the one above) I threaded the whole thing on there by hand and my fingers are still hating me for it. The rest of them I ended up threading it on part of the way, using my impact to thread the bolt into the nut on the car, and squishing the washer to the head of the bolt.
The next snafu that struck me was that when I assembled one of the projectors the projector cover was tightened down too far towards the bottom. It wouldn't allow me to get the long bolt through it when I had it mounted in the car. There just wasn't enough of an angle to get it through the hole. I ended up having to remove the projector from the car, loosen the four bolts, slide it up, retighten them, and reinstall. No bueno:
Bueno
:
I figured after that all I had to do was screw down 3 bolts per projector and connect four plugs. In reality, I did, but again that wonderful misnomer came back to bite me. After adjustiing the misaligned projector I went to thread in the long bolt that replaces the OEM springs. Getting two springs on the bolt when you can't see what you're doing at all in a tiny space was the first major pain in the ***. Once I got them on there and jammed the bolt through the OEM hole I couldn't thread the nut onto the end of it. There was just absolutely zero space as the threads of the bolt were all the way to the side of the headlight bucket. I know this is a crappy picture, but it is in a crappy position where you can barely see what you're doing so getting a good picture is impossible.
You can see the way the bucket kicks out a little right near the end of the bolt. I ended up having to remove the other two bolts that I had just installed, jam the bolt through the hole as far as I could and thread the nut on there. This picture illustrates the amount of space I'm talking about:
From the front:
After fighting through the same problem on the other three projectors I connected all of the wiring and checked the headlights for clearance. While I was installing them I thought there was no was what so ever that these things were going to clear, but... They fit with about a hair of space through there. Driver:
Passenger:
I fought with screwing the headlights down by twisting the **** with my fingers for a little while and got extremely annoyed. It would have taken my all day to do it by hand so instead I decided to improvise:
Impact + extension + 3/8ths nut driver = like a champ. I can zip the lights up and down in less than 20 seconds.
With all of the clearances set and the wiring hooked up all I had left to do was reconnect the battery and check them out. This is the light output of just the driver low beam:
Low + High (keep in mind none of these lights are aimed. This is just how they ended up)
Both side low beams:
The light output is absolutely amazing to say the least (There's also a 500W light on in the back ground). My jaw pretty much dropped and after all of the work getting these things in I will say that it is 100% worth it.
I did then run into a couple other issues. I had the low beams on and as soon as I flipped the high beams on my car lost all electrical power. I thought that I blew my main power fuse or that I lost the headlight fuse. I checked them all, they were fine so I went over and checked all of my connections which also turned out fine. I pulled the battery cable and tried to reconnect it to no avail. By the time the power went out I needed to be getting ready. After not getting it to work with the battery I decided to pack up and call it quits. For some odd reason though I left all of my stuff that I had to take upstairs next to the battery so when I walked by I had to try it once more. Upon hooking up the cable electrical power was restored. I flipped the headlights on again, they came on, flipped the highs, they came on, but after a few seconds the lights started to flicker. I made a dash for the headlight switch, but power went out again before I could turn them off.
Right before class I shot Brian at BLS an email asking him what he thought. We thought right along the same lines as a voltage issue. My battery is as far as I know 4 years old and has been sitting in my car the past 3.5+ doing nothing. I think I just ran it dead, but when I hooked the charger up it won't charge over 20%ish. I'm not sure if it is the charger or the battery, but either way I won't be testing the lights again until I can either get a new battery or jump the battery off of my 95 like I did when I finsihed repinning the harness.
All together the kit is absolutely amazing. The light output is unlike anything I've seen before. I may have had some self induced hassles putting the kit in, but everything is as plug and play as it gets. Brian really put these kits together well and he is a valuable resource himself. Any email I shot him with questions was responded to usually within a few hours and right on the money. I can't wait to get my car back on the road and driving around at night so I can actually for once see out of the front of one of my cars.
The first step of mounting the projectors is to slide a 10/24ths flat washer over the oem adjustment bolt. You'd think that should take less than a second to slide a washer over a bolt. For some odd reason the ID of the washer wasn't the same on all of the washers. On exaclty half of them it was off just a little tiny bit, but it was enough to cause it to not want to go over the bolt. You can see in this picture how the washer has removed a layer of material from every thread that it has passed over.
On the first one (the one above) I threaded the whole thing on there by hand and my fingers are still hating me for it. The rest of them I ended up threading it on part of the way, using my impact to thread the bolt into the nut on the car, and squishing the washer to the head of the bolt.
The next snafu that struck me was that when I assembled one of the projectors the projector cover was tightened down too far towards the bottom. It wouldn't allow me to get the long bolt through it when I had it mounted in the car. There just wasn't enough of an angle to get it through the hole. I ended up having to remove the projector from the car, loosen the four bolts, slide it up, retighten them, and reinstall. No bueno:
Bueno
:I figured after that all I had to do was screw down 3 bolts per projector and connect four plugs. In reality, I did, but again that wonderful misnomer came back to bite me. After adjustiing the misaligned projector I went to thread in the long bolt that replaces the OEM springs. Getting two springs on the bolt when you can't see what you're doing at all in a tiny space was the first major pain in the ***. Once I got them on there and jammed the bolt through the OEM hole I couldn't thread the nut onto the end of it. There was just absolutely zero space as the threads of the bolt were all the way to the side of the headlight bucket. I know this is a crappy picture, but it is in a crappy position where you can barely see what you're doing so getting a good picture is impossible.
You can see the way the bucket kicks out a little right near the end of the bolt. I ended up having to remove the other two bolts that I had just installed, jam the bolt through the hole as far as I could and thread the nut on there. This picture illustrates the amount of space I'm talking about:
From the front:
After fighting through the same problem on the other three projectors I connected all of the wiring and checked the headlights for clearance. While I was installing them I thought there was no was what so ever that these things were going to clear, but... They fit with about a hair of space through there. Driver:
Passenger:
I fought with screwing the headlights down by twisting the **** with my fingers for a little while and got extremely annoyed. It would have taken my all day to do it by hand so instead I decided to improvise:
Impact + extension + 3/8ths nut driver = like a champ. I can zip the lights up and down in less than 20 seconds.
With all of the clearances set and the wiring hooked up all I had left to do was reconnect the battery and check them out. This is the light output of just the driver low beam:
Low + High (keep in mind none of these lights are aimed. This is just how they ended up)
Both side low beams:
The light output is absolutely amazing to say the least (There's also a 500W light on in the back ground). My jaw pretty much dropped and after all of the work getting these things in I will say that it is 100% worth it.
I did then run into a couple other issues. I had the low beams on and as soon as I flipped the high beams on my car lost all electrical power. I thought that I blew my main power fuse or that I lost the headlight fuse. I checked them all, they were fine so I went over and checked all of my connections which also turned out fine. I pulled the battery cable and tried to reconnect it to no avail. By the time the power went out I needed to be getting ready. After not getting it to work with the battery I decided to pack up and call it quits. For some odd reason though I left all of my stuff that I had to take upstairs next to the battery so when I walked by I had to try it once more. Upon hooking up the cable electrical power was restored. I flipped the headlights on again, they came on, flipped the highs, they came on, but after a few seconds the lights started to flicker. I made a dash for the headlight switch, but power went out again before I could turn them off.
Right before class I shot Brian at BLS an email asking him what he thought. We thought right along the same lines as a voltage issue. My battery is as far as I know 4 years old and has been sitting in my car the past 3.5+ doing nothing. I think I just ran it dead, but when I hooked the charger up it won't charge over 20%ish. I'm not sure if it is the charger or the battery, but either way I won't be testing the lights again until I can either get a new battery or jump the battery off of my 95 like I did when I finsihed repinning the harness.
All together the kit is absolutely amazing. The light output is unlike anything I've seen before. I may have had some self induced hassles putting the kit in, but everything is as plug and play as it gets. Brian really put these kits together well and he is a valuable resource himself. Any email I shot him with questions was responded to usually within a few hours and right on the money. I can't wait to get my car back on the road and driving around at night so I can actually for once see out of the front of one of my cars.
02-13-2011, 08:44 PM
#4
Wow...absolutely the cleanest install I have seen so far of this kit. Excellent write-up and honest review of the kit. Your comments are very appreciated and I'm looking forward to an output shot to show the difference between the kit and stock housings.
Good luck with the rest of your build so you can actually enjoy the car and driving at night
.
Good luck with the rest of your build so you can actually enjoy the car and driving at night
. 
02-14-2011, 09:57 AM
#6
Wow...absolutely the cleanest install I have seen so far of this kit. Excellent write-up and honest review of the kit. Your comments are very appreciated and I'm looking forward to an output shot to show the difference between the kit and stock housings.
Good luck with the rest of your build so you can actually enjoy the car and driving at night.
Good luck with the rest of your build so you can actually enjoy the car and driving at night
.Thanks, I told you that it was going to look good. I tried to get a picture of the output with my garage door open, but didn't have enough time because of the battery. The light output, coverage, and cutoff is amazing though.
One of my friends was jesting that I spent so much on headlights and that I could have bought an HID kit off of ebay. I told him that the results don't even compare. I've seen other kits in person and this puts them to shame in terms of performance. Not to mention they're complete drop ins and you get a sponsor who backs up their product 100%, replies to all questions extremely quickly, and knows what they're talking about. If all of the sponsors on here were that good I'd be much further along with my car than I am now.
Thanks, getting these in the car and seeing the results are giving me more motivation to get it back on the road.
Trending Topics
02-14-2011, 10:21 PM
#9
I'm probably going to pull the battery out of my 95 and stick it in there to get the lights aimed and some pictures of the results.
What I'm trying to figure out now is how I want to do my fog lights. I read your posts on redoing the OEM ones / buying Ebay replacements. I'm still thinking about 880s, but I'm not sure.
02-15-2011, 02:17 PM
#10
Wire routing for the fogs really isn't an issue - you can't see any of that when the headlights are closed - especially if you're into fabbing covers like you did.
02-15-2011, 09:30 PM
#11
^ Thanks for the info. Both my DRLs and fogs are in extremely sad shape. I'd like to find some new ones that look OEM, but are cheaper repos. I may try to hunt down a decent set of LT1 style TA fogs, rebuild the DRLs, and possibly use some of the OEM C6 pieces I have as that would be more of a budget option.
I had an odd idea of jamming another set hella projectors down there. I think they might fit.
I had an odd idea of jamming another set hella projectors down there. I think they might fit.
02-17-2011, 11:29 PM
#15
Hmmm... I need to track down a set of glass fog lights and some good condition DRLs then. That and figuring out how to setup my battery cutoff switch the way I want it are on the top of my list of things to do.
Thanks guys, I have a lot more clean / trick stuff in the works. I just ordered some more parts yesterday and am working on getting another major task checked off of my parts to figure out / order list soon. All of the work will go in my Formula thread, but I may have to do another thread for this stuff.
Thanks guys, I have a lot more clean / trick stuff in the works. I just ordered some more parts yesterday and am working on getting another major task checked off of my parts to figure out / order list soon. All of the work will go in my Formula thread, but I may have to do another thread for this stuff.
