HID Spotlight Wiring

Hey everyone, have been lurking here for a while and PM'd Martin a while ago to pick his brains about spotlight wiring - said I'd post up the setup I was working on when it was all finished, so here it is!

I always try to keep my cars looking standard so this set up for HID spots actually uses the OEM foglights on main beam only. Not nearly as a good as a dedicated spot setup I know, but I feel on main beam the Jimny (understandably) loses a lot of light close up and this setup was designed to counter that - I guess they're more floodlights than spotlights?!

Anyway, the reason I thought it might be interesting to others is that I adapted a readily available HID harness you can pick up on eBay for £10 or so - if you're thinking of mounting spots on the front of the Jimny there should easily be enough wiring in the kit & it makes everything really simple.

This is the sort of harness I'm talking about:


eBay link (no affiliation!)

and here's a diagram of the changes you have to make:



Because I like the option of being able to return the car to stock at any point I got the switching feed via a H4 connector - again, pretty cheap for a pair on eBay - which I spliced into instead of the car's wiring:



As I was running the wiring to the foglights I attached the ballasts here:



... but obviously you mount them close to wherever your lamps will be!

Fitting HIDs to the OEM Cibie fogs is a bit of a faff, but doable - the unique(?) twist-close holder that holds the H3 bulbs has a similar tab layout to H10 bulbs, so with a bit of tab filing (and a wee dab of sealant to make sure it's 100% sealed) you can slot them in place of the holders.



For me getting it all working and tidy was worth the effort - there's now a huge amount of light in front of the car and it actually stretches quite far into the distance too. That's the beauty of HIDs I guess, and these are only 35w!



(Personal preference to go for the 3000k bulbs as I have yellow caps on my bulbs, again just a preference! I believe the 4300k bulbs are a pretty good match for standard halogens.)

Hope that makes sense anyway and might help someone out!

KABUMP!

With Winter about to slide back in to our lives. Lights and HID are a cool and safe mod. Glad you said Fogs and not main lights. Without projectors IMO HID's are dangerous retrofit upgrade in std lights.

Good on yer mate. Looks a nice neat install and obvious increase in luminosity

Thanks! Just figured the setup - and adapting the HID harness especially - might be useful to people

Totally agree with putting HIDs in standard lights, and even retrofitting them into older projector-style lights rarely works from what I've seen - or rather what I've been blinded by! - on the roads. I think HID upgrades should be for main beam only, either with spots or, if you're really lucky and have separate bulbs for main beam, in the mains-only portion of your lights. Just IMO though obviously

Could not agree more