Today at Atelier Kaz - ex-Honda R&D, F1, Indy/CART engineer

I started to work on another NSX from last week but since my boss got back
from Japan at the same time, I had to spend most of the time
acting as her driver.


While I was driving with the head lights on, I started to feel that the right side
head light was not as bright as the left one.
When I looked at them from the front, I noticed that the driver side was
showing faint blue tint compared to the passenger one.
It used to be just bright super white beam.

I installed HID conversion kit long time ago and replaced the original kit with
the single box solution 6 years ago so looks like one of the burner
(equivalent of the H1 light bulb on OEM head light) started to show
sign of failure after 6 years with 40K miles.

I drive almost every day and with lots of night time driving,
I didn’t want ending up running with dead head light so decided to
replace both burners.

I bought spare burners when I bought the 2nd HID kit 6 years ago so
no need to wait for the delivery especially around this time of the year.

As same for almost all HID conversion kit, the burner kit comes with four wires.
Two for the burner itself and the other two for the power supply for the
controller box.
In fact, it’s using the OEM light bulb socket wires inside the head light unit for
the power supply in order to trigger the controller only when the head light
dip beam was activated.

As R & L burners have their own separated controller, it requires separate
trigger/power supply cables when you are 100% of the time using both
head light units at the same time/distance so kind of waste from the point of
installation/removal and wires.
All you need is battery voltage at the two identical controller units when the
dip beam switch was activated so started looking into making my own relay loom as
I have several spare AMP connectors.

However, after surfing over the web, I noticed that there are many HID relay cable at
really cheap price and since the connectors on my burner and controller were using the
copy of AMP Superseal model any way, I thought I will just give it a try with these
cheap product and replace the main components such as the wire, relay, fuse, terminal,
connector, etc if I don’t like them.




So visited the ebay and got this one.

Less than GBP7 including delivery charge and although it was made in China,
it was stocked in UK so ordered on Thursday and delivered by Saturday morning.

The wire gauge was large enough for the purpose and although it was not as flexible as
my Teflon coated one, good enough for using on the production car.
The terminal looked to be very cheap plated one so may increase the resistance
over years but will see.
The protection sleeve, tube and heat shrink were again very cheap model but
good enough for my purpose.


Not sure about the relay reliability and durability but I can get replacement from
Tyco or Omron over night so not a big issue.
It came with 30A standard blade fuse but looked to be so cheap that
I replaced it with my stock.

So, all in all, at this price, I was quite impressed with the build and material quality.

I don’t like using these blue/red cheap quick fastener in order to break into the
OEM loom so looked up the wiring diagram and found that there is RED/YEL wire at
the 14pin WPC behind the head light unit that delivers the battery voltage when
the dip beam is switched on.

It’s the wire connected to the black wire at the light bulb socket that powers up
the H1 bulb.
As I have spare WPC 090 terminal, just de-pin the original RED/YEL terminal from
the mating connector and inserted my DIY single wire with 090 pin crimped so that
I can easily go back to OEM if required.

You only need one wire to trigger both R & L lights as it will trigger the control side
of the relay circuit and each HID controller will receive the power simultaneously
directly from the battery through the switched side of the relay.

As the burner body/socket is ceramic, there is no need to touch the OEM white and
black wires at the bulb socket so just keep them as they were.




Now only two wires to deal with when replacing the burner.
Just apply liquid gasket to seal the tiny holes where the two power lines
used to be inserted.


There are several dedicated GND terminals at each side at the front compartment
so very easy to create the GND circuit.




Not sure if it is required to carry out the burn-in process on these burners or not but
since I disconnected the battery for the loom installation, I wanted to reset the ECU
any way so kept the light on while warming up the engine for about 30min.

Once warmed up, switched off the light, let the ECU to learn the engine status for
about 15min and done.


Ready for another shopping trip.


Kaz