Decided I'm finally tired enough of the stock housings to do something about it. About a week ago I went up to a bluegrass show deep in the mountains, and driving back on I70 into a lane of heavy ski traffic, I couldn't see a damn thing on a lot of sections of the highway. My setup was adequate for my commute home from the shop at night - Olympus Offroad LED conversion in stock housings make for a great low beam spread compared to traditional halogen bulbs, but the high beams were no brighter... just a little taller, and they didn't get quite as wide as I would like (ya know, deer). My commute home is a 2-lane back road up Golden Gate Canyon, I don't like using my LED bars on a lot of that, because there's often blind curves where I'm likely to blind the living daylights out of oncoming traffic. But on that road, the LED's and stock housings were OK, not a lot of other traffic to drown out the light from my truck, etc.
So I buckled down and hopped on the Retrofit Source group buy. Got the D2S kit with the 50w ballast and 6000k bulbs - which with the higher wattage ballast, should put out 5000k light color.
This is my project for today (along with cleaning, doing stuff with horses, making some pizza, so on).
Testing the high beam solenoid sounded like I was operating a telegraph.
Once you've got the lens off and the housing is cooled enough to handle (almost immediately), remove the reflecty dingus.
I found no mention of the solenoid leads in any instructions here on TW, so I figured I'd snap a picture - there's a hole by the notch that holds the spring/bulb holder dingus in place, thread the wires through there and you'll never see the wires again.
Note the hole. Once you're here, just put the H4 adapter plate/spacer/washer thing in place, and then tighten the lock nut down. I found that doing this with the housing still warm helped to soften up the silicone washer, and pushing the projector unit into the housing and tightening the nut as much as possible helped to remove all possible play. The threads on the projector aren't really all that finely machined, so expect a bit of a challenge to get this secured. It kind of sucked, but it's fine.
I'm personally not a big fan of the way most of the shrouds look that are available, I chose the Iris shroud, it's simple and clean, no fuss.
I was thinking I might go back in later down the line and pull the lenses back off, and wire in a loop of amber LED strip, similar to what I used in my bed for lighting, as turn signal lights. I wasn't sure if I wanted to do that just yet so I held off for now; my thoughts are that the amber might reflect off the back of the housing and make it look kind of cool when blinking.... that might not be the case, but either way, I need a better turn signal on the front, and that's cheap.
I'm not sure yet where to go to aim these things, there's not a single bit of flat ground up here on the property, might be able to find something in town, but I'll be sure to get output shots soon.
In the meantime, here's the first actual photographs I've taken this year. It's been wacky weather up here, and yesterday I woke up to bluebird skies above me, and dark dreary clouds to the west; with everything covered in a pretty layer of frosty snow.