Destination SSM

I figured I’d make a quick post about the headlights I whipped up.  I’ve been trying to order the ORACLE headlight kit from GoMiata for months, but they kept jerking me around saying it was going to be in stock in a couple days, order it now, yadda.  After that happening a few times I got tired of it and cancelled the order entirely.  It was an ugly kit anyway, and 600$ + shipping, so I figured I could do better, for cheaper.

I talked to The Retrofit Source and told them what I was looking for — a high and low beam real projector unit, as simple and lightweight as possible.  They suggested their Morimoto Mini H1 Bi-Projector, which is 120$ for a pair.  It’s made to go with xenon bulbs, but with a little shaving a normal halogen H1 bulb would fit, he said.  Works for me.  I ordered a pair of those, a 35$ relay harness to split up the stock high/low beam into the different wiring I’d need to power the bi-projector, and a pair of cheapo HELLA H1 bulbs off Amazon, and waited a week.

When everything arrived, I spent a surprisingly short amount of time snipping some extra metal off the H1 bulbs, removing one of the screws from the backing plate of the projector, and the projector went together and powered nicely off a 12V battery I had kicking around.  The relay harness arrived shortly afterward, and I made a simple bracket out of some strap steel (for now — I’ll make a real bracket out of thicker aluminum when I have some more time) and tested it all out.  Everything, surprisingly enough, worked perfectly the first time.

I bolted it all to the car to make sure it’d fit exactly where I wanted it to (below the stock roofline), and checked the lighting pattern.  Everything was great.  0.8 lbs per side for the projector setup, and I pared the relay harness down to 0.6 lbs, giving me a total of 2.2 lbs all in for the headlight setup, which is an excellent savings over the 19.2 lbs of the stock setup, and actually much brighter lighting with a better cutoff to boot.  As part of the carbon fiber hood (which arrives next week), I’m getting some lexan pieces to go into the stock headlight location to protect the headlights, and everything will be complete.

This entry was posted on February 29, 2012 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Headlights, Lightening . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.