So I thought I would go ahead and start this thread here as well. I have also posted it on HIDplanet. I was sick of the poor lighting that our cars produced so I decided to do something about it. The OEM xenon's are not acceptable either. The beam pattern is horrible and they are outrageously expensive. I decided to go with the regular headlight housing from a 2006 and modify it to fit the projectors. I didn’t want to cut the back of the reflector but there was no choice.

Protip: To open the headlights, use a heat gun to heat the BLACK housing. DO NOT HEAT THE LENS. From there, you can hold the black housing and push down with a flat head screwdriver on the lens. It will separate and it will not mare and cut up your housing. The key here is not heating the lens or it will warp and with the force from the screwdriver deform your lens.

Protip II: 2002-2004 are horrible to open, skip them and go with a 2005-2006 headlight.

Projector kit purchased from:

http://www.theretrofitsource.com/pro...v4sdu35bb570ob

Background:

2002 R53 Mini Cooper S
2006 Facelifted headlights
Morimoto Mini H1 projectors
Morimoto 3Five 4.3k H1 bulbs
Morimoto 3Five 35W ballast

I first mounted the projector and found problems:




You can see how far it sits and there is interference with the lens. Here is a reference of the stock xenon and how far it sits back:



Where mine sits:



So as you can see, a cut to the reflector had to happen.

Here is the cut to the reflector:



After pitching around a couple of ideas I decided to go with this:



I wanted to be flexible and be able to remove it and still provide a good mounting point. Pitched around the idea on doing a 2'' PVC threaded cap but it was going to have to be jb welded and would rather not do that.

Here are the brackets. They still need to be modified a little:



Here is the new locations. You can notice how much further they sit back:



Back of bracket:



You can still see I need to modify the bracket to make it level and also trim the reflector to pull the projector back a little further:



Front shot:



I have the mini Gatling gun shrouds but I am thinking of using the MC-R shrouds. The only problem is that there is going to be A LOT of trimming on these. If anyone has a trashed xenon headlight and could let me borrow a shroud so I could use it as template and make the cutting much easier. I would pay shipping back and forth and your shroud would not be damaged.

I will continue to update this thread as things progress. Any comments are welcome.

Also, I would like to give a big thank you to Matt at www.theretrofitsource.com for providing information and going above and beyond. If you guys want to do a group buy, I could probably talk to Matt about it.

 

Better off if you were in 1st gen forum.

 

Yeah, i didn't really know where to put it considering it is R56 headlights.

 

They are still R50/52/53 lights, R56 started in '07.

Here is a R56 with the GTI-R trimmed tons.

I went with the GTI-R becasue they told me they were small but I still had to cut a lot.

 

ooohhh...sorry about that. But thanks for your picture. it looks great. quick question, did you have enough space behind the light without hitting the wheel well? Were you able to use the back cover?

Thanks again.

 

I'm wondering if you ever finished this retrofit?

 

Yeah everything fit into the stock housing and can be swapped into any R56. Aside form my crapsmanshift it looks OEM-esque to me once all sealed back up.

 

Not yet. I should finish it in about a week. I ended up going with the MC-R shrouds. I'm trying to make templates for anyone wanting to do it later. I will scan them off and upload as a PDF so you can cut out.

 

Testing the projectors in the housing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNad-uZEcsA