I just purchased a 2005 R53 that was by no means a normal Cooper S. Any normal person that would have bought a car like this would just drive it around and be happy with it the way it is, but I have a disease, and it has to do with wrenches.

First thing on my list though is to lighten up the front of my car... with four PIAA lights. I was able to get two 85 watt driving lights and two 55 watt fog lights off of wrecked car that came into the body shop I work in. I got them for a steal, but I didn't steal them (left them off to save a customers deductible). When I got them however they did not come with harnesses as they were hardwired into the truck as opposed to softwired.

Instead of paying $100 each or whatever ridiculous price PIAA charges for their harnesses, I'm going to MacGyver it. I've been reading a lot about calculating wire gauges and fuse grades needed and I think I've come up with a good wiring diagram. If it looks messed up, let me know because this is the first harness I have built.

So far all of my supplies are coming from Waytek (relay, switch, and connectors) and WiringProducts (wire), and one fuse splitter from Amazon.

The wiring is the easy part, the hard part will be when I mount it. I'm cheap and won't pay 100 bucks for something that I could build myself with scrap I have, so all the mounts will be custom made. Stay tuned for that.

 

So I talked to a friend of mine who knows a lot more about wires than I do and he said everything looked good, but he did say I should probably hook the driving lights up to the high beams so I don't attract the attention of Johnny law.

As for the brackets, they are all done, glass-beaded, and ready for paint. I didn't like just about every bracket that I saw online because the fog lights end up blocking some of the airflow to the radiators and all that crap. With that in mind, mine do not block any of the airflow into the cooling system.

I routed down four of the holes on the front reinforcement in order to lower the point I could bolt in the brackets so I wouldn't have to cut a visible section of my bumper. behind them are four floating nuts that are welded to a strap to prevent them from turning.



From there I welded these up


And viola, rally style fog lights that don't block airflow!

 

Nice! I am saving this thread for when I do mine.

 

Well I've had these done for a while and figured I better better post up some pictures just to finish the thread up. I changed a few things in the final wiring harness design from the diagram I have drawn up. I ended up using all 16 gauge wire instead of 14 and 18, and it made things a lot cheaper. Wiring is fun but man is it time consuming. I grabbed power in the engine bay from the battery jump lead and I grounded the lights to the front rebar. Inside the car I used the cigarette lighter to power the fogs (so they can be tuned on whenever), and I tapped the high beam wire coming out of the ecu in order for the auxiliary high beams to only come on when the normal high beams come on.









I found some really nice switches online that exactly match the orange lighting inside the mini and I mounted them where the seat heater would normally go on a car with the cold weather pack.



And these lights are amazing! I think I lit a tree on fire with the high beams. The fogs are pretty great also. They are both angled in such a way that when I am a highway I can illuminate both ditches to watch for deer. If I wired it to be capable of doing so, I could turn off all the factory lights and drive it, there would be no problem with visibility whatsoever. Who needs xenon!

 

Awesome thread!