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Xenon Headlight conversions.

Have you noticed that all the most expensive cars now have brilliant blue-white Xenon headlights, that make yours look like candles in jam-jars?

There are a lot of 'Xenon' lamps available at the likes of Halfords, but beware because these are just ordinary bulbs with a blue colouring on that don't really work well. The problem is that ordinary tungsten lamps emit mainly red and yellow light, meaning that when you shine them through a blue bulb, they just look crap. Proper Xenons don't use bulbs with filaments in at all, they use an electric arc passing through a gas between two electrodes to create a brilliant white/blue light. The trouble with this is, you need a special control box to generate the 25000 volts to start the arc and then about 85 volts to run it.

Xenon headlights have previously been very expensive, typically a £500 option on a new car. Even the bulbs for my Audi are still £140!

However thanks to Ebay and the expertise of China's engineers you can now get a full kit of 2 lamps and control units for about £100 making them definitely within 'boy racer' budget. I got a kit recently and fitted it in about 2 hrs as below:

First get the Scoob out of the rain and get the kettle on...
This is the protective cap from the rear of the headlamp unit being drilled to 25mm for the new grommet and cables. These are all supplied. Some cars are a bit cramped behind the headlights so you may have to remove your battery/washer bottle/engine. The Scooby wasn't too bad, just the battery and a piece of air duct had to come off.
Fitting the grommet and lead in/out wires to the newly drilled hole. You then fit the Xenon tube and connect your 12V out to the control unit. Beware here with cable colours. The Scoob has red and black with black as positive! Bloody foreigners.
Connections done, lamp in, grommet fitted and cap back in place. The two top connections are the high voltage ones to the Xenon lamp, the red and black are the original Subaru wires going to the headlight and the braided pair are the 12V out to the control unit.
Finding a spot for the control units proved challenging as the Scoob is not known for under-bonnet space. Managed to eventually find a space and with careful use of some self-drillers the control units were secured.
Ah, Xenon light. There are various 'colour temperatures' available. Basically the higher the colour temperature the bluer the light. They go from 6000K which is white to 10000K which is very blue. These are 8000K which I think is just right.