So what is a bi-LED projector retrofit? In this video I'm gonna explain exactly what it is and show you how it's done. Hey, I'm Chris and welcome to Fly Ride where you're gonna learn all about custom lighting. Recently my buddy Mickey hit me up because he picked up a crazy little car. It's called a Suzuki Cappuccino.
That's pretty funny. That's really funny. It's only available in right-hand drive and the headlights really suck. At the same time my buddy Anthony hit me up with these new LED projectors and he wanted me to try them out so I thought that would be perfect for Mickey.
The idea of a retrofit is just putting this in place of the factory bulb or taking out the factory projector and putting this in its place. And this has a little LED inside and a window that flips down which allows high beam and low beam out of one compact little unit. However... they were way too small so i had something sitting on the shelf from a few years ago called islands they were three inch led projectors so i brought them with me down to throttle and i just want to show you what this all turned into and then how we got there so let's check out this video from mickey all right you can see he's got the low beams on right now nice sharp cut off now he's got the high beams on looking really really good honestly for a car that he couldn't really see the road him to have this kind of cut off line it looks like a brand new car i'm freaking pumped And I know he is too so I'm really excited to show you what's about to come up How we got to the point where my dudes going down a canyon run able to see everything feeling good about his car This is Zucchi cappuccino. It's hot in here.
Let's just dive into the video All right, I'm a throttle let's talk to Mickey and find out why I'm here and what we're gonna do Well today we've got my 1993 Suzuki Cappuccino. This is sort of a rare car here in the States. It was imported from Japan.
It's called a K-car which fit a specific class of cars over in Japan. Very low horsepower, very low weight, very economical and one place they skimped on was the headlights. Of course as with all our projects we we give Chris and Fly Ride a chance to Improve the lighting and so today we're gonna give it our best shot to make this thing have lighting from the 2000s instead of 93 These have the same exact clip as like a Toyota Supra and any of the other it would just be crazy if they weren't butyl I mean everything's super clean though.
I get it I got the projectors that Anthony from mod Auto sent me and I've never messed with them before so and package some earlier They're weird kind of like LED. They got little drivers, but they pack a huge punch so I just think If we've got these tiny little H3 projectors in here, I've never even seen anything like that before. They couldn't be any good based on what I've seen so far, so these new ones, I think they're gonna be awesome.
So we'll give it a shot, retrofit them, and see what the output changes to. This little wiggly bastard is so weird. Yeah, what is that?
I don't know! It's literally like held in place by the boot. Definitely a butyl.
Yeah. Cool, perfect. Well, then literally that's all we need to do.
Alright, so this little dude has a different adjustment than the others. So, if I back that up, it's actually threading in. But then there's this guy, and if I back that up...
it actually unthreads. So now I'm tightening this. And there she goes. So I'm guessing we're going to pop the backs off of this. And we're going to try to reuse this, right?
Maybe. Yeah, I mean, let's just get... creative so that might actually mean Might play nicer in that See I want you to explain like to my audience okay Yeah Yeah, it's super strange so realistically the only way to get Killer output from these is to ditch this big guy.
So I mean we could absolutely Modify this and then basically just bolt the bracket to that personally I think they're really cool, but they're just way too small for my dudes headlights, so we couldn't use them It's gonna be a much different deal. So then there's no question. That's just a lot that whole section off This whole metal raised part and then that will give us this for the lower ball joint And then these two points of adjustment and then basically it becomes how do we use these little bolt holes.
...on that, which is obviously super easy, and just attach it to this bracket. But if I zip off the rest of this material and just keep this flat plate. Yeah, we just need those squares on one side and a little circle on the other.
Almost every projector in a retrofit gets modified. Every time. Okay.
I would just marker it out. Literally just go straight from this, hold it as tight as you can get it. I mean, I think that's pretty much there.
And then just trace out your... Does it look centered? I think this is what people don't realize.
This is what retrofitting is. This exact stuff right here. And most of the time, somebody's already done all this for you and they got the little brackets and it's more like a bolt-on affair, but... Yeah.
This is it. I mean, and I think it's gonna turn out amazing just... So long as you get past the little obstacles there, but you got the right tools for it. Generally people don't and then they get stuck Bless you. All right, so this This became that while I sat right here and Mickey did all the man stuff.
So the new projector will basically just clear into all of this awesomeness. So we're gonna make sure that any of the material that we have to remove just clears so this thing can sit completely flush with that. Let's see what happens next.
Now it's just gonna come down to making sure it's clocked. See that little ridge right there? Yeah.
So it's the nut or whatever. I'll get rid of that if I have to, to make that sit flat. This needs to look... Titties! Anything?
Anything? Bueller. That is pretty straight.
I'm not upset at all. Okay, so how do we adjust it up? So that's where it gets a little bit scary.
The opposite is going to be the hard part because of the clearance issue. It looks cool in here. Now how are you supposed to figure out how high your projector should be adjusted to?
So let's pretend that instead of there being a glowing fish and some sequential fog light bezels over there, that's the front of your car. And here is the new projector, which happens to be a sexy bi-LED projector from Anthony at ModAuto. Okay, so here's what we're gonna want to do. We need to find out how far from the ground to the middle of this projector lens is.
Let's do that first. So right here I'm seeing 35 inches from the ground is dead center in the middle of that projector. It's blinding me right now. Okay so now here we are at about 14 feet away from there and we're gonna see the cutoff line and we're gonna measure how far from the ground that is.
So we can see that we are about 19 inches away from being level. So these projectors would need to be angled upward. Now, if you have a truck or something that's either really low or really high, obviously this is going to be slightly different.
But for the majority of cars, a straight line is what you're going to want. So we're going to want to find 35 inches on this if it were to be aligned perfectly center with my bench here. Now, if this kind of information is helpful to you and you want to catch more of it in the future, make sure to hit that subscribe button and... and don't forget to hit the bell notification icon so you don't miss any uploads.
And the last thing is, if you can hear this fan on this projector right here, there was also a fan on the projectors we put in Mickey's lights, but we had to take off the cover because of fitment issues and it got scary because if we angled it too high up, that fan was gonna hit the bottom. Probably could've damaged it. No, Tiki, no Ricky Tiki.
No, that was me slipping the screw. It's not moving a whole lot, brother. You're already pretty adjusted if you look at how much thread is through. that. What you think about retrofitting to the extent that something has to be redone once you've completed damn near everything else?
Yeah that's that sucks and that's you know something that if you're not If you don't take your time and do it right the first time, you gotta do it again. And as an installer, that costs a lot of money because time is money. Yes sir.
This is the bi-LED projector in there. It's just, it was crazy man. We had to take it apart a lot of different times and do a lot of different trimming. Lots of modification to that factory bracket.
But it looks really cool, so. Definitely at the end of the day, if my dude can drive at night and see much, much, much better, then that's really all that matters. It was just a pain in the ass, especially the big crazy part about this was by LED So it's got the high beam that function has two wires coming out the bottom of the projector And there's also a cooling fan right there and we took off the little cover for that so we had to reroute the wires after having already sealed the light and it just made it kind of Just troublesome because you know you feel like you're done and then you're like now We're gonna tear it all open again and get back in there and reroute wires and reseal But I think our seal came out better the second time anyway, so I'm not mad.
So that was pretty damn intense. We're still not aimed. We gotta go up with them, but that looks good. So some of you guys that like to do headlights can see that we've aligned the cutoff and it's about 21 inches from the floor, so it's really great. And then really modernized the front of the car.
It's really hard to tell in the shop, but it's a much wider light than yellow. We've also upgraded the turning lights and the daytime running light, which is great. Yeah, for a little half day project, this is pretty cool. Chris here because he has been doing this for a really long time.
So whenever we do a project like this, it's really nice to have him come down and help out. What do you think about somebody silly enough to do this every single day? Not me.
There's a lot of retrofit guys that just want to retro all day. I mean, definitely for your personal vehicles, absolutely. I don't think I'd want to do it for a living, that's for sure.
It's definitely a grind, and I wouldn't want to have to do it more than once every few months, I don't think. Alright, that was that. Adios my man!
Alright, thanks Chris! Take care! So, I got a pretty long drive home. I don't even think this is going to find its way into a YouTube video, unless...
I don't know, unless I just feel like... sharing the long truth of what retrofits actually look like. That's what I feel about them.
I gotta go home.