New, Used Head Lights - City Light DIY

 

  After much anticipation I'm finally getting rid of these Ebay headlights. Thanks to my buddy Jeremy, I now have a used set of stock headlights. They are in good shape, just needed a little polishing. 

  I'm using the ole Turtle Wax manual kit. Comes with the little sanding pads and some compound. It's ok. The box says clarity in minutes. If by minutes they mean 30 then, sure. The left side light was fairly oxidized so it took a good bit of sanding and polishing to get it looking decent. Maybe I'm just too picky.

  After a bit of polishing and a sore arm later, the lights are looking much better.

  I've had this conversation before about the halos vs no headlights. I went to a parts garage near me on Saturday. The gentleman who owns it showed me his Euro M3 lights he got from Italy. They had city lights in the high beam housing. I had no idea that was a thing on the Euro lights. They looked beautiful. That's what got my gears turning.

  I took a look when I got home to see if there were any good DIY's out there for city lights in stock housings. I stumbled across this post: City Lights with Pics. I felt confident I could manage to make something similar work.

  After work on Monday I stopped by my favorite auto parts store. Three isles in, left, almost to the end of the isle, knee level. They had 3 different variations of lamp pigtails that accepted a 194 bulb. I went with the 90 degree ones due to the space constraints near the high beams on Helena. So here's what I did to mount them.

  Tools of the trade:

• 5/8 spade bit
• Small drill
• File
• Marker
• Some rotary tool
• Measuring device
• Power Drill

  Materials:

• x2 85868 Dorman License and Sidemarker Socket

  I first used the small drill to make a hole roughly 25mm below the ridge on the outer ring of the high beam mount to the center of the opening I was making.

  Then, I used the spade bit at a high speed to make the 5/8 hole. The spade bit didn't care for the plastic it got stuck once it got close to popping through. I stopped short and used the rotary tool to finish the job. Its easy to do since the spade bit leaves a good spherical template to follow.

 Once you have the hole we need to make the four square openings for the pigtail lock twists. I used the rotary tool to rough them in then, I finished it off with the file to clean the edges nicely.

  Then we just need to twist our pigtail in. These Dorman ones were fairly flexible and sealed the opening well. Just be careful not to over do the opening. Erring on the side of being a little too small is better than too big in this case.

  Now I need to swap the lights and wire these up. Since the eBay specials on there have the Halos wired into the turn signals already this will hopefully not be too bad an install. More to come on that note.