Eric is a super awesome friend that helped me with most of this.
So here are my old lenses, didn't take a picture of my new ones, kinda forgot. It's pretty hard to tell the difference through a camera anyways.
So the difference is, old lenses slightly blurred light, and clear lenses did not distort light at all.
So to get to where I where the lenses are, first I had to take off my front bumper. The screws under the car and in the engine bay weren't too hard to take out, just the one behind the tire walls were... I had to turn the tires one way, go around the mud guard, and unscrew the screw that was barely visible. Wasn't too hard to take out after feeling around for it, but it was pretty painful to put back in. But it did involve starting the car, turning the wheels for more screwdriver clearance, then after taking out on side, turning the wheels the other way.
No bumper!
Oh, and notice the foglight cables, yeah I have cables for foglights that I don't have. I'll get some one day.... when I have a real job and lots of time and lots of money and did I mention money?
Then I removed the headlight assembly. The paper blobs are just holding the HID bulbs, cause they're not supposed to get dirty.
Which I dumped into my living room.
Then came the hard part, opening them up. To do that, the silicon seal needs to be melted so the housing can be pried apart. For the first one, I stuck it into the oven. Bad idea. My oven isn't big enough, and one edge got too close to the edge of the oven. So my passenger headlight now has one corner slightly melted.. and it's easily noticeable. So the second headlight we used a heat gun. Considerably slower, but it didn't melt off corners. Just goes to show guys should stick to power tools, not kitchen appliances. :P One day when I have more cash on hand, I'll replace it. But that's way way down on the list.
So the headlights look like this opened.
It takes so much effort to get it opened. With the headlight coming out of the oven, everything was hot, so it doesn't matter where you grab onto the lights, hot. With the heatgun, only the area the heat gun was spraying is hot, which takes considerably longer to heat up all the silicon everywhere. It pretty much became, heat, pull, heat, pull little by little until it came open. It doesn't help that there was nothing to grab onto to pry it open.
Silicon got everywhere too. It's like gray super sticky boogers that cools into a rubberlike material.
After it is open, its simply unscrewing the thing holding the lens in place, changing the lens, and screwing it back on.
Sealing it isn't too hard either. Both headlamps got closed using the heat gun. Heat silicon, squeeze, heat, squeeze until closed. We did a pretty messy job of closing it, cause silicon gets everywhere, and no one can see it anyways.
Then everything else got put back together in reverse order.
From preliminary observations, the light is definitely sharper. Staring stupidly at the light from many angles, it seems like there is some blue flicker added too, but it's hard to tell. Oh, and it was nice how we kept seeing spots after repeatedly looking into the lights. Don't do it, they're bright even in daytime.
Before. On my garage wall for lack of better wall. I'm not sure if the sharpness of the beam can be photographed well enough to see the difference.
After pictures will come up when it's night out. OK. Managed to get the car out. First the cutoff looked kinda like this...
Which took a while to realign.. and I don't even think I did it correctly.
That cutoff is actually not correct, but I don't really know whats wrong, and I don't have the tools to fix it, or the time. Since I have to replace the headlight I melted, I'll eventually open these up again and fix it... eventually.
But the cool side of this is, the blue flicker.
Next: LED tailights! Probably one of the easiest lightning mods. Yeah, I need a break from the tough ones.
It's currently Metroid themed. :D
