"HOW TO" Ebay Halo Projector led replacement (56K WARNING)

[scrammer]

Are you ready to perform surgery?
Here you will learn how to replace the white leds that came with your halo housings. You may be changing light output or even color. Hopefully this read will give you a bit of an idea of what you are getting yourself into. Never soldered before myself, I found it a bit hard at first, but I was getting pretty good midway. I do suggest you practice on something else before attempting to do this mod. Don’t want you messing up $150+ headlights!

Tools needed:
Needle-nose Pliers
Solder Iron (stick style, no gun)
Solder

Products needed:
3mm leds (your choice of color and brightness)
5mm leds can be used but not recommended. This will require trimming and modification to interior housing. This is a bit tricky to perform.

• Remove rubber grommets from housing.

• Unless you have small fingers, use the needle-nose pliers and gently remove the leds from the socket from within the housing. Be patient!

• Remove wires from led board (You may need the pliers for this)

• Remove rubber grommet from leds

• With solder iron, heat up the solder that is holding the oem leds. Quickly, you will need to remove the leds from the hot solder. This may take a few tries. Take your time and be careful not to melt the plastic on the led board. Do not remove the resistors that are attached! Take notice how close the leds are before you remove them from the board. Also, the board should have a positive and negative side. This may be noted with a + and – on each side.

NOTE: When soldering it may be easier to have the iron held in a stationary position so you may have both your hands handling your project. Also, you may want to use needle-nose pliers when handling these item. Solder is hot and so is the iron. Most irons go up to 700degrees F.

• You will see that the leds DO have a positive and negative sides. The Positive the long lead. Also, if you look at the led itself, the positive is usually the tiny side of the bulb.

• Cut the led leads down to about 8mm. now bend them into a half-box shape. This will help you when you go to solder.

• Now with both hands, you may hold the board and led to solder the lead to the resistor. You may wish to melt some solder onto the tip of the iron, and then dap or drag the point of connection across the hot solder.

NOTE: Be sure to have your new leds as close as possible to the board. This will insure proper fitment.

• Repeat this procedure for both leds on each board. Be positive that all 4 boards look just the way they did when you removed them. Again, this will promise best fitment.

• Now, replace the rubber grommet onto led board. Be patient as you will need to feed the terminal leads through the holes in the grommet.

• Attach wires to terminal leads.

• Feed wires back through the housing grommet.

• Design and build the wiring harness for your Ebay Projectors.

• The final result should look something like this. I appoligize for not having a before and after pic to show how dramatic the difference is in light output.

GOOD LUCK!

[IcEMage]

Wonderful write up! All the more reason I need to get me a set of these.

[Focus ZX5]

how quickly do the original Halo LEDs burn out? are they of good quality?

[scrammer]

i have heard from a week to a few months, but we are all in agreement that they are cheapo's. these are rated for like 100K hours.

[heelflip101]

cool diy, I planed on buying those headlights. I don't mind sodering but I can't imagine what else is wrong with these headlights.

[Focus ZX5]

apparently they're good, high-low beams/turn signals seem to be good...anytime there are LEDs involved, you'd expect a short life span

[scrammer]

^^agreed, just the leds. both the halos and the 194 eyebrow leds.

[loudfocus01]

Thanks for the write up.....i'll probably do this eventually since my halos have recently burned out on me.....

[MooZX3]

I guess I didn't realize What the halos LEDs looked like.
I guess I just assumed they looked like the eyebrow LEDs.
Thanks for the write up scrammer.
I like your wiring harness too, but It confuses me.

[MooZX3]

Also, you got your LEDs from the Hong Kong dealer?