Well, with a lotof help from the First Gen Guru Dustbuster4, I got my HID's installed today. It was a fairly easy task to install them, the hard part is mounting the ballasts somewhere in the engine compartment, luckily, we have detailked instructions with pictures to help you guys who want to upgrade your lights to the HID's.

First, thanks to "threepointzero" for the group buy offering, I hope he does it again for the rest of the board!

Here are the instructions, First, you get the kit, open it and check it out. Startegically plan on where you want to place your ballasts before you start to work on the kit. Then you kindly remove the original lights from the housing of the car, place to the side, or back in a protective wrapping so you will limit the amnt of damage to the bulbs. After removing the lamps/bulbs from the car, replace with the lights/bulbs you got in your kit. Place the into the housing of the car and then proceed to grab your ballasts. Take your ballasts, then hook up the wires that come with the kit into your ballasts. You won't get them confused because they are of the plug and play variety, they won't connect unless they were meant to be together, just like a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces fit together well or something is wrong.

 

picture of lights installed

 

picture of ballast cable install

 

 

man i hope he can do it again....or at least get me one

Here is what i asked on the car talk post

"Awesome! So if you had to do it again, would you go with 6000k??"

 

Next is to place the ballast and the cabes into the engine compartment and connect the wires to the light. There will be two cables that will have male pins at the end of them, with red and black cables, these go into the harness/socket that connects to the light socket in the car, usually it is white with a plug like interior piece with two female ends. Make sure when you plug these into the socket, you match up the colored wires with the corresponding colored wire in the harness, and connect the black/ground wire first, then the red wires.

 

After connecting these wires, your lights should work. Turn on oyur headlights to test them, once they work, turn them off and mount yoour ballasts somewhere in the engine compartment. Here is a great location on the drivers side of the car to mount your ballast. They have double sided tape, but you may want to pull that off and use the self tapping screws that come with the kit for a more secure fit.

 

Now for the passenger side, there is a problem. For a 1997, there isn't much room, so you may have to mount your ballast with zip ties to some hoses and cables for a secure fit. There is a reservoir that will limit the amount of space you have on that side of the car, Dustbuster4 has better pics of that install, but his work fine with that set up.

For 1998 - 99 CL's, we don't have that reservoir, so we can actually mount our ballast on a flat part of the engine compartment as shown in the picture.

 

There you have it! It should take no more than an hour to have them fully installed. 10 minutes for the lights, then the remainder of the time trying to mount the ballasts securely into the engine compartment. If you follow these directions, it should be 30 minutes or less.

I apologize about the many posts, but I don't exactly know how to post with multiple photos, so when I learn, it'll be easier to give instructions to you guys.

Happy install and have fun.

Here is the final result for the 7000K Hid install!

 

 

only one question for ya... was it worth 450 bucks????


MaCe

 

we only paid $375....i think. i'll tell ya when i install them sometime this week

 

I have the 7000K ones and they are plently bright but i think i would get the 6000K ones if i had to do it again. I know the 5000K ones are brighter but i want some color to them and the 6k seems to be the best mixture.

As for if they were worth it, i think they were just because it is so much nicer to drive at night. My mom even likes them.

Oh dajuice is it safe to mount the ballast on the bottom like that? Thats where i have mine but i was worried about water getting to it. We have had huge amts of rain lately and havent had a problem but i just wanted to be sure

 

1stgen, you say you would get 6000K HID if you could do it again? are they "brighter" than the 7000k? I was hoping for the brightness, and some color...but I've heard that 6000K is like pure white....what do you thnk?

 

wait.. isnt it higher the number of rating the brigther it gets??

cause im getting 7500k blue next months....

 

I read ealier that 6000K was like the brightest, as far as usable light goes, after that, it's all about color. 1stgenCL had 9000K's which were purple as hell, but had poor light distribution...i'd say top out at 7000ks as theyve had positive feedback from dajuice and [b]1stgenCL]

 

Dajuice27 has several pics of his 7000K next to my CL with 6000K. Hopefully he'll post them for comparison!

D27: Your HIDs look great! If I had to do it again, I'd get the 7000Ks. They're more blue than mine (which I prefer)!

 

Perhaps you and 1stgenCL should swap kits He said the same thing but the opposite

The pic as posted and both your cars look phat! I'm dying to get a hold of mine!

 

I love my 7000K lights. I think they are bluer than the 6000K lights and emit about the same amount of light output. As you get further up the color spectrum, the lights get bluer to purple and lose the brightness that we need for night vision. The 5000K lights are nice, I think the 6000K - 7000K lights are ideal for most peoples taste and color brightness on the road.

 

Yeah that seems to be the biggest misunderstanding for most people in the market for HID's. They think that the higher the K rating, the brighter it gets. NOPE! The higher you go in K, say 8000k, you are only getting color but losing a lot of the brightness. Here is a link that was provided in the car talk forum that explains all this. I think everyone that wants to purchase HID's should read this first....to get a better idea of what kit they want.

http://www.intellexual.net/hid.htm#miscon

 

Yea tw1112 is right. The higher the color rating the worse the output. As you could see from my pics the 9000K bulbs were really purple but really dim. I read on the philips forum that the highest color temp that can be made from just the salts (think its the salts in the bulbs) is 6000k after that the bulbs are coated for color. If anyone is considering HIDs i strongly recommend the philips forum. There is so much info there and it will really help make your buying decision. I dont have the address on this computer but do a search in like metacrawler for it