Nice to hear you have some experience with improved lighting. Most people have a hard time understanding just how average or poor factory lighting is until they get behind the wheel of a car with proper output.
Many Japanese cars such as Honda/Acura, Nissan/Infiniti, Toyota/Lexus have decent factory lights, most other global brands are pretty terrible. Porsche probably has the the best performing lights I have seen relative to the other German brands but still plenty of room for improvement.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Yes, that is possible. Just make sure the bulb is a D2S base and it will swap right in. There are lots of fake bulbs so buy from either the Retrofit Source or Amazon through "Philips" only, not sure if Philips offers the new WHV2 on Amazon yet so TRS might be the only option for a reliable seller.

Evan

 

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Interested for sure

 

Since one of the headlights was structurally compromised from a previous accident we decided to source a complete replacement headlight. After one failed eBay transaction where the headlight purchased ended up having a broken projector bracket (same issue as original headlight) we struck gold with another eBay light. By shuffling some search terms around I was able to find a nice complete headlight for $375 shipped. Not bad since most 996 headlights in decent condition go for $500-$800/ea. After it arrived I was able to see that it was in better condition than I expected, aside from a few small rock ships in the lens it could have almost passed for new, it was in truly exceptional condition.

It must have come off a very low mileage car as the excellent condition continued continued inside the headlight with a projector bowl that offered a nice smooth mirror like finish. I took the opportunity to line up the 3 projectors which had varying levels of deterioration.









How does this affect output? Here are output pics comparing the frosted bowl to the like-new one *Both projectors have clear lens installed*
The frosted bowl smooths out the output but it diffuses/kills lots of intensity and also width.





In the the last photo above you can see some small dips in the cutoff line on the wider parts of the beam pattern, that is caused by these little metal tabs which protrude above the shield. They were removed to keep the cutoff flat and uninterrupted. #DetailsMatter







Viewing the bezel from the backside you can see the clear acrylic pieces are mounted with some melted studs. The acrylic inserts need to be (carefully) removed for paint and reinstalling them can be done a few ways, many people use a steel epoxy like JB Quick, although that works with a high success rate if applied correctly I still prefer something more secure and a REALLY small drill bit allows me to make some <1mm holes to run some thing steel wire. Holes were drilled prior to grinding out the studs to ensure proper oem fitment.







Reflective bowls de-chromed



Bezel sanded



Bezel and bowl painted!





Acrylic reattached



Here is a before an after along with some "glamour" detail shots.

 

Wow- Evan!
Black bezels look outstanding with the clear trim ring. I guess we got lucky with a almost perfect reflector bowl from that ebay headlight.

Cant wait!

Thxs Rich

 

AMAZING WORK! Am very interested in getting mine done like these too! Any ETA on when the current set will be completed?

 

Yea, we got lucky!
Hoping to have the headlights done this week but as this is the first build there can be some surprises which might arise and properly addressing those and making sure the headlights are 100% is the focus even if that means the build takes a bit longer. Of course getting the build done "ASAP" is always the goal but never at the expense of build quality.

Evan



Probably the least enjoyable part of this whole project is "retrofitting" the external headlight washer into the interior bezel to plug the hole of the now deleted headlight washers. I need to test fit the mounting depth to make sure there will be no contact to the underside of the headlight lens, that would be no bueno.










Here is the orientation of the oem projector fog light, as you can see space it TIGHT, only a few millimeters of clearance all around.




The Morimoto "matchbox" HID projector will be replacing the stock halogen projector. Believe it or not the matchbox is actually a bi-xenon projector offering both a low and high beam but the high beam won't be necessary for this fog application so the shield and solenoid are removed, I will be building a custom shield out of aluminum flashing.


Thankfully I was able to shoehorn the HID projector inside the oem fog light after some trimming, this is important as the manual height adjustment will be retained so the fogs can be dialed in as needed. #Function

 

Is the clear reflective trim part of the original light? That really is going to look great and define the classic 911 while keeping the look of 996 headlight intact. Could the washer hole just be filled smooth and painted? Can't wait to see these finished.

 

Unreal craftsmanship Evan.
Thxs for the extra effort/attention to detail. The two HID projector per light will be incredible i'm sure.

Rich

 

Hey - I think it would be cool to turn the headlight washer into a turn signal. It could pop up when the signal is turned on and have an LED light inside that blinks. Then, the lower part of the headlight (with the turn signal in it) could be blanked out resulting in the look of the "standard" Porsche headlights.

Anyone?

 

If you are referring to the oval shaped clear acrylic piece which loops around the projector and the high beam assist, yes, that is part of the original headlight. It is more prominent now that the surrounding bezel is blacked out. The washer hole could be filled, smoothed, and painted but to be honest I don't have a background in auto body work and is beyond my scope of skills at this moment, I have molded small shrouds before but I wouldn't be confident tackling the washer hole on this build. I would be more adventurous if these were my own headlights.
You are welcome, thanks for taking the leap of faith with your headlights, I am sure all the other 996 owners appreciate you being the guinea pig. Headlight modifications can make very trustworthy people weak in the knees.
That is a pretty creative idea but I think it would be a bit or work to execute it properly. On this build we are blacking out the turn signal bowl so the headlight will be fully blacked out. To offset the lack of reflection with the chrome deleted we are replacing the oem turn signal bulb with a brighter LED unit.

Evan

 

We are using RSR headlight lens cover- That was the main driving force behind the design project.
This is the lexan factory RSR lens we are using- no pop up washer system.

 

Retrofitting these mini HID projectors has been the biggest hurdle of this project and one of the more challenging retrofits I have done due to the REALLY tight dimensions I am working with. With the bezel in place there is only 1-2mm of clearance between the projector lens and the shroud, on the other end the HID bulb protrudes rearward and actually sticks past the housing so the stock cap can't be used. This is all compounded with my goals to always make headlights function in an oem fashion and in this case that means retaining the manual vertical adjustment of the stock projector. I am happy to report I have had success but it took many hours of grinding, test fitting, measuring, readjusting, testing fitting, in repetitive cycles.

I revised the mounting solution for the projector from fixed spacers to nuts and red lock tight which allows fine tuning of the projector adjustment. I noticed that with the fixed spacers, even though they were all exactly the same size the projector wasn't sitting flat. With these individual nuts I am able to flatten the vertical aim and also adjust the toe-in, think of it as an alignment on your car but for light output.

Since the stock bi-xenon shields were removed I built some custom shields form aluminum flashing.






Since the oem cap wouldn't fit I had to make a hybrid cap with what I had lying around, it turned out great. Mini victories like this are very satisfying with retrofitting #problemsolving






You can see the bulb protruding from the housing


The cap does a great job not only sealing the housing but also it allows enough clearance for FULL range of adjustment of the projector.






Here you can see just how tight the clearance is between the bezel, tight but it fits!






3,000k HID bulb fired up


Exposure dropped


Here is an output pic of the stock fog projector with a "yellow" halogen bulb. The yellow doesn't really come through.
Exposure was locked between this photo and the next.


As you can see the 3,000k HID bulb is much brighter and also has a true yellow color. The bottom of the output is wavy due to the headlight trim, the halogen projector above was removed from the headlight and had nothing to potentially block the output.


Almost there, next will be mounting the bezel plugs, then cleaning, resembling, and testing everything before sealing up the lights.

 

Correct, no washer holes in the lenses but the bezel still has the holes, they could be left as-is but you would be able to look down into the headlight and see the backside of the fog projector so to "finish" the look I wanted to plug the hole and make it look as oem as possible.

What would have been the best solution (if money is no object) is if we sourced a pair of the 996 headlights which were not fitted with the optional headlight washers and took those bezel pieces which don't have holes, it certainly would have made my life easier.

 

996 non litronics have no headlight washers if u can find a pair.