Little back-story: My old headlights were yellowed and fogged over. For a while I mulled over cleaning up the stock lenses or replacing the entire assembly. Replacing the entire assembly won on an intoxicated impulse buy. I chose the Dual Halo R8 style halogen projector assembly. At the time of the install i also added fog lights to the car. Not doing a ton of research on the topic, I ordered a 5K HID kit for the headlights and fogs. Knowing that the HID would not really be true in a halogen projector, I figured it would be better than HID in the stock housing. After getting everything installed, I was horrified by the crazy light pattern the cut off shield generated. It was bad, and made me paranoid to drive at night. Here’s a quick look at what i was working with



So that was terrible. I decided I needed to fix it, so doing it right and being done with it was my only option as far as I was concerned. I then started doing extensive research on HIDPlanet, and they had tremendous information and insight for this project. The long and short of it is, it looked like a small HID Projector would fit into the Ebay headlight with little modification. It came down to the E46 model and the one I chose, the Valeo out of a B5 A4/S4 Audi which uses a D2S bulb. I was kinda partial to the Audi projector due to the fact the car I owned previously to my 'camaro was an '02 S4 and I always loved the headlights. Also, the Valeo offers very nice color at the cut off. I dug around on EBay and found a pair for sale.

I began the project by removing the headlight assembly and then baking them open. Both of these steps I will not go into too much detail about because there are numerous other posts outlining this. After I seperated the assembly, I was quite pleased with what I found. The actual projector portion of the headlight was one piece and just screwed in. I was not going to have to cut out the halogen bowl from the assembly.



Heres a close up showing the Halgoen projector


I simply unbolted the halogen projector from the assembly and this is what i was left with

The walls of the housing were nice and think, which left plently of material for me to work with.

Heres a side by side of the Valeo and the halogen projector


Here is the Ebay projector opened to show the crazy cutoff shield.


This is the Valeo cutoff. I didnt want to take it apart for fear of damaging it.



You can see in the side by side that the Valeo bowl is just slightly wider than the halogen one, so I had to grind down the assembly opening to get the Valeo to fit. The picture appears to have a hard ridge line inside the assembly, but there is not. I just took my time and slowly but surely removed material until the Valeo slid right in.


At this point the Valeo was ready to be installed. I took the headlight back outside and reinstalled it on my car. I made sure my car was parked on LEVEL ground. I used a line level to level the projectors by placing it between the openings on the sides of the Valeo projector. Once the projector was level, I used self tapping screws to secure the projector to the housing. Unfortunatly, in my excitement that this was going soo smoothly, I forgot my camera inside for both headlights! Heres the installed Valeo


The projector cover fit like a glove and required zero modding. At this point, I reassembled everything, baked it and installed it on the car. Heres the right side, then left side, then both together.




I stayed with the factory Fresnal lens for fear of the Ebay lens changing the focal length and bluring the cutoff badly. But I was pleased with the cutoff sharpness for a Fresnal lens. The color was also very good as advertised at the cutoff.



The car is 25' from my garage doors for adjustment purposes. Heres from behind the car.


Head on





Here they are in the daytime(not on, I forgot to take those pics) as well as some car pics so you can see how it all works together. The halos and LEDs are visible during the day.










Im not looking to be flamed over my headlight choice, I know they are not for everyone. I was just looking to show that a projector swap is possible with the Ebay headlights. Overall im very satisfied with the improvement in lighting at night. On a scale of 1-10, id say this project is about a 4/10 in difficulty.

 

I think it looks great man.

 

i think they look GREAT at night, but alittle funky in the daytime. but thats just me. but yeah i ordered some projector halo's off some website and the line of sight was awful. i had to do a bit of fixing. but they turned out pretty great. Good looking car man!

on a side note. what kind of camera were you using to take these pics?

 

Wow!! Those look awesome!

 

looks great, looks like all that patience/research paid off.

 

Looks great

 

Thanks to all. All the patience and research def did pay off. Huge difference

 

great job looks amazing!

 

look amazing! car is awesome also!

 

They look good on your car! I was considering buying these also but instead got another style of halos off ebay. nice writeup on the swap though!

 

Thank you very much for the kind words.

For these pics, I used my Canon 50D with a 24-70mm L USM lens.

 

Looks great. This is getting added to the Lighting FAQ.

 

Oh wow! I made it to the big leagues with my first at bat... Thank you!

 

They look awesome dude.

 

so much win in a situation that started with such loss

impressive

 

I have to admit those do look really good. They almost flow with the body line of the hood seam.. I'm not a fan of aftermarket lights, I like the whistler personally but I would run those on my car.

 

good looking car.

 

thank you for doing this. I adjusted mine enough my cutoff is better than what you had, but yea..it's ****. Now I know I don't need to spend ~$500 in parts to retrofit my stock housings

 

Wow that original cutoff is screwy. Who put the approval on THAT?!

I fully expected that projector to be built into the base housing, not a removable piece. That's pretty sweet actually.

The only different thing I'd do is paint the LED strip black. I don't like it personally. But other than that, looks great.

 

that's part of my new plan