Bi Xenon Projector Project wiring help needed please

[Nine8Six]

Nice one, Paul. Those heat-wraps should be plenty sufficient to secure that old wiring. Yours must have been a DD often driven during evening/night, seen that weaken wiring before where others driven less during dark hours are still fine today. 55w halogen = 5amps (4.5?) constant on that tinny wire

If I'm right i.e. the new ballasts let pass an incredible amount of init current (depending on the new circuit resistance) then that lil puff of smoke you've seen is no surprise. One way around that is to beef up the gauge size within the headlight assembly or ideally connect the ballast power rail to the battery directly. The latest being what many retrofiters does in fact and the safest set-up (requires extra wiring and some clever fiddling).

Are those new ballasts engineered for high power 55w or 35w? you know? In any case you'd want the small/cheap 35w preferably. No need to go overkill there...

[PaulE]

Originally Posted by Nine8Six

Nice one, Paul. Those heat-wraps should be plenty sufficient to secure that old wiring. Yours must have been a DD often driven during evening/night, seen that weaken wiring before where others driven less during dark hours are still fine today. 55w halogen = 5amps (4.5?) constant on that tinny wire

If I'm right i.e. the new ballasts let pass an incredible amount of init current (depending on the new circuit resistance) then that lil puff of smoke you've seen is no surprise. One way around that is to beef up the gauge size within the headlight assembly or ideally connect the ballast power rail to the battery directly. The latest being what many retrofiters does in fact and the safest set-up (requires extra wiring and some clever fiddling).

Are those new ballasts engineered for high power 55w or 35w? you know? In any case you'd want the small/cheap 35w preferably. No need to go overkill there...

Thanks again Fred. I have 35w ballasts. And I'm doing this project with a bunch of well-used headlights I picked up relatively cheap. My headlights are in great shape and they are still in my car with your GT Collection projectors as built by Particlewave. Last year one of my inner lenses in those projectors came unglued. Earlier my COB Halos in those lights had died, even though they were on relays and only lit up in the parking light position, turned off in the headlight on position and I never used them. I was able to re-wire and re-install my parking lights in those headlights, so rather than bother Charles and go through shipping my light again, I disassembled the light and re-glued in the inner projector lens with help from Charles. This all happened about a week before a 1,000 mile road trip in the car for a track event. Which is why I bought these used headlights, I used one in its original shape for that road trip. Having had a success in removing the outer lens and reassembling that light, I thought it was time I tried to build a spare set for myself.

Here is a picture of my car at Virginia International Raceway with one good looking GT Collection bi-xenon headlight and one very tired original amber headlight with a very burned inner lens!

[Nine8Six]

Cool stuff, love that track shot with the winkle front That guards red behind look awfully large(r), but hey man... its guards red Funny to see how those camera lenses twist reality sometimes.

Have fun with the new built! Won't lie I also have quite a few prototypes sitting on the bench here. One with dual-projectors 1.5"+2.5" lenses and another set as an attempt to replicate the newer models, projector with the 4 LED. Both look silly and didn't won over the original GTC (Turismo) so didn't really bother to snap pic, install or release.

Read you'll crack on with this during the weekend so let us(me) know if there anything we can help with, Paul. Best man!

[PaulE]

Thanks Fred. The red car is my friend. I finally got him to the track a couple of time this year. I'm off tomorrow so I'll spend some time on this project.

Originally Posted by Nine8Six

Cool stuff, love that track shot with the winkle front That guards red behind look awfully large(r), but hey man... its guards red Funny to see how those camera lenses twist reality sometimes.

Have fun with the new built! Won't lie I also have quite a few prototypes sitting on the bench here. One with dual-projectors 1.5"+2.5" lenses and another set as an attempt to replicate the newer models, projector with the 4 LED. Both look silly and didn't won over the original GTC (Turismo) so didn't really bother to snap pic, install or release.

Read you'll crack on with this during the weekend so let us(me) know if there anything we can help with, Paul. Best man!

[PaulE]

Thanks again Fred, the bench test did the trick! None of the components are burned out, everything works. As I originally said, I had assumed the power wires that put 12V into the canbus were black - negative and clear - positive. Well, that is backwards, and polarity of power going into the canbus matters. Once I tried reversing positive and negative power everything works on both sets. In my defense, nothing in any of the Morimoto instructions I could find says that the black wire is positive and the clear wire is negative. And when I was a kid and worked on simpler cars, black wires were for negative ground and red or other color wires were for positive.

I didn't need to try using the DMM to see what amps are being drawn, but since I had everything set up, I put the DMM in line on the circuit and saw it go from 0 -5.85/5.86 when I powered it up. It never went any higher and the light lit up pretty fast, so maybe it draws more on startup but it is so fast I can't see it. The DMM is 10 Amps max, and that didn't blow.

So now to reverse the power wires in the unit I've assembled and then put the second unit together which should go a lot faster!