Summer of 2016, I baked the headlights on my WRX. If you don’t know what baking is, basically you put the headlights in the oven so it’ll soften the glue sealing it. You then pull it apart so you can access the insides and paint the ugly chrome plastic bits. Doing this allows you to go from this

to this.

Definitely an improvement. As you can see in that bottom picture, I had a blue and black theme going on. My front emblem was black with blue stars, my zip ties were blue, my high beams were blue. Well that has since changed. I’ve moved away from that and towards a more sleek black/gray/white look. My front emblem is now gloss black with matte black stars and I was getting really tired of the blue in my headlights. It was time for a refresh.

This time around, I decided to go all black and add in some LED Halos for a more aggressive and custom look.

This post is going to be an in depth view on how I made this happen and what it takes to make them work. If you aren’t interested and only want to see the final product, scroll down to the bottom where I’ll have pictures and videos of how they work.

The Install

Figuring Out The Wiring

It was a cold and rainy night. The time was nearing 2am and what was I doing? Not sleeping. I was on the ground, in a parking garage, pulling my bumper off so I could remove my headlights. I had already spent a good hour and a half adjusting my coilovers prior to this and was feeling the tiredness creep up on me. I had to do it though. Its Saturday night. Its my last night of the weekend to do this project and I wouldn’t be in town next weekend to do it. Now was the time and I was tired of waiting. I just wanted to work on my car. Well to say the least I was pretty psyched to be doing this project. It would transform the look of my car and bring it one measly step closer to completion. So I pushed on, not knowing that the project would take 6 hours and I wouldn’t finish and get home until 9:45am.

So yeah, there I was, laying on the ground trying to pop all the clips off my bumper with a box cutter because I forgot a flat head screw driver. I’ve taken my bumper off many times yet this was the hardest. Not having a flat head was one thing but I also had a new skid plate which connects to the bumper and zip ties keeping it more secure. All in all I basically had to remover 10 clips, 7 bolts of different sizes, and a handful of zip ties. Once that was off the real work began. I disconnected my headlights and located the turn signal wire. The halos I bought were switchback so they would be white normally but would switch to amber and begin flashing if I had my turn signal on. This was cool and all but I had to figure out the wiring. It was pretty simple but I definitely didn’t want to mess it up. Using a cheap volt meter I picked up from the hardware store just a few hours earlier, I was able to figure out which wire did what.

The black was ground obviously, the red was power for the turn signal, and the green was constant 12V. Basically how it works is the lights are connected to all three wires. When the turn signal isn’t on, the red wire doesn’t supply power, only the green one. However, when the red wire starts to send power, it doesn’t send it in a constant flow. It fluctuates between high and low voltage. This is what allows your headlights to blink. On the halo, there are two wires going to the actual light itself, one black, and one red. These connect to a little ballast which has 3 wires, one orange, one black, and one white.

Once I figured that out, I did some real time testing and used the actual halos to see if my results were correct. And they were. And I was stoked. I connected the white wire on the halo to the green wire, the black wire to the black wire, and used a wire tap to connect the orange wire of the halo to the red on the turn signal harness.

The wiring was the one thing that worried me the most and I had already figured it out and it wasn’t even 4am yet. I was on a roll. I packed up everything I needed, well not everything (wow look at that, foreshadowing), and put my bumper back on and headed to the BTU lab in the Atlas building to get to work on the hard part.

Did I mention that I kinda like the look of no headlights?

Pulling the Headlight Apart

I didn’t mention this earlier but one of the main reasons I decided to do this in the dead of night was so I wouldn’t have anyone to bother me. I knew this would kind of be an annoying project and I also wanted to film it for my YouTube channel so it was wise to go at 4am because I was the only one there. I’m glad I did it also because my stuff literally took up both large tables in the entire room.

Once I had my music setup and found the tools that I would need, I got started splitting the headlight open. The first time I did it, I did the traditional baking method where you put the headlight in the oven. This kinda fucked up my headlights as it melted some of the bottom and it warped. This time around, I used a heat gun and it was so much better. It took longer and was more work but it was more precise and I controlled every aspect of it. The first headlight took about 20 minutes but I got into a rhythm and the second only took about 10.

I immediately took the piece with the blue on it to the back, taped it off, and applied the first coat of black spray paint. I was sick of the blue and so excited to get rid of it. While that was drying, I started pulling apart the second headlight. That one came apart quickly and it was back to spray paint with the other one.

Installing the Halos

I had studied a few YouTube videos on how to install these halos and while they were all kinda shitty, I did get a few tips from them but ultimately this was just me figuring things out as I went along. The first thing I did was cut the wires on the halos. They had a connector on the end that would have required a larger hole than the wires themselves so I just cut it off so I could thread the wires through a hole I drilled in the plastic and solder them back together.

I drilled this hole with a 1/8″ drill bit. After threading the wires, through, it looks pretty clean. Soldering the wires back together was super easy.

The halos themselves have 3 holes around the outside. They are super small and big enough for the thinnest wire that I could find. Once the power and ground wires were threaded through, I placed the halo where I think it looked best and poked a hole near each of the holes on the halo with a thumb tack. Heating the plastic up with a heat gun made this process a lot easier. On top of that, I would poke another hole close to the original ones to thread the wire back through so I could secure it behind the light.

With the wires poking out the back of the light, I originally was just going to twist them to keep them there but that was a pain in the ass so I decided to use hot glue. And with that, the first halo was installed and ready to go.

The process is exactly the same for the other headlight.

Connecting all the wires

To recap on what I said earlier, the turn signal wiring harness has 3 wires, Green, Black, and Red. The halo ballast has 3 wires as well, White, Black, and Orange. After my testing earlier in the garage, I figured out that white needed to be connected to green, black to black, and orange to red. Since orange had a wire tap and female connector, that was already done. The black and green needed to be soldered. I used wire strippers and an X-acto knife to make this happen. I used the wire strippers to make 2 cuts in the wire perpendicular, then with the X-acto knife, I made a cut parallel in between those to so I could pull that bit of plastic away and expose the actual metal part of the wire. The entire time I was in constant fear of cutting my finger while I was doing that. It didn’t happen.

Once I figured out that I actually did have all the stuff I needed to solder them together right there, I was stoked. Originally I thought I would have to bring a soldering iron out to the garage to connect the wires but no, the whole wiring harness disconnected and I had it with me in the room. But I forgot one of the ballasts. So I ran back to the garage at like 6 in the morning in the rain to grab that one little thing that I thought I didn’t need.

The halos came with weird connectors on the end of the white and black wires and I didn’t want them so I cut them off. I used the strippers again to give me some exposed wire and wrapped that around the exposed wire of the turn signal harness. From there, just soldered them together and wrapped them in electrical tape making sure that each wire was isolated from the other. Almost didn’t do that and had to go back and re tape some of my previous connections. That saved me a huge headache.

Putting the headlights back together

Once all the soldering was finished up and the paint was dry, I put the headlights back together in basically the reverse order of taking them apart. I fed the wiring for the halo through the grommet where the low beam connector goes through and that was that. I used the heat gun again to soften glue to get the lens back on the actual housing and replaced all the screws. Once the headlights were assembled I headed back out to the car to put them back on. In broad daylight. It was like 8am.

Connecting the headlights again was super easy, just the reverse of taking them off. I added in some HIDs so I had to do a little more wiring and ziptied a bunch of them together but that was super simple and not worth sharing in this blog post.

The Final Product

You’ve already seen the final product cause its the featured image of this post but here are some more pics as well as a gif of them actually in use.

This install was a huge pain the ass but well worth the time. The end product looks incredible. It was also a great learning experience. I figured out a bit of the wiring on my car, got some more experience soldering, and the ability to not get freaked out being in a workshop in the middle of the night all by myself.

If you are interested in doing this on your own, make sure you have a solid block of time to get it all done and make sure you double check your work. Wiring and electronics are kind of a pain and its easier to do it right the first time than it is to try to figure out whats wrong with it. I got these halos from The Retrofit Source in case you’re looking to pick some up for yourself. If you also have a 2011-2014 WRX or STI, 90mm ring size works quite well.

If you read the entire blog post have a cookie. You earned it. If you didn’t read the whole thing and don’t want to but still want to know how to do it, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel and watch the video when it comes out. Or you can subscribe to see my other videos. Just subscribe.

Also if you are wondering why most of the install pictures are pretty bad, well its cause they were screen capped from the video I took for this install.