Well, this post is about 2 years in the making. With two smaller kids at home, there's no time in the day to do anything. I guess I can thank Corona for finishing this project, despite it not being quite what I had planned in the beginning.
To follow up from where I left off, here's my last post where I had a finished self-designed 3D printed headlight bracket:
What did you do to your 5th Gen today? and
this one.
Since I don't expect anyone to keep track of what my planned project was, I'll sum up. I essentially installed the following into a set of Ebay purchased "clear" headlight units for the 11-15 Explorer.
- BI-LED Koito 3" projector headlight units (I got them from Lightwerkz, at the time, with tuning). These are the same headlights found in some newer Toyotas (2017+ Prius I believe)
- Switchback halos from Diode Dynamics (90mm, should probably have gone with 100mm).
- And I got programmable light strips (and lots of other stuff) from Adafruit to make a "flowing" LED turn signal inside.
The light strip is the part of the project I had to scrap. There was no easy way to get the strips to look good inside and not look cheap, so in the end I squeezed cheap "AliExpress" led strips that have the same effect (but are nowhere near as cool) under the light itself. I will be replacing those at some point with something better, if I find something and have the time and willpower. I see now that Adafruit does
side-lit strips of the same kind that I got, which might be just the ticket for something "not inside the headlight itself". They do draw a lot of power however.
After taking headlights apart (using a heat gun and pulling) and assembling the new lights, halos, wiring etc, and putting them back together (Morimoto butyl sealant + heat gun + pushing hard), and then of course taking off the entire grill and lower bumper (which by the way, is much easier than just taking off the grill - for those that are looking to paint it), the new headlights fit perfectly. However, the turn signal sockets on the Ebay lights was different than those in my car, but luckily I don't need them so I left the sockets it came with on (without bulbs in them). Otherwise some wire cutting and mending would've solved that easily.
The result is actually better than I expected. My halo install could've been cleaner wire-wise, but I was sick of the whole thing and was ready to throw the project in the trash many, many times. The Koito light output is incredible. Compared to "LED" replacements that I've tried loads of, nothing comes close to what it is now. This kind of light output is what the Ford Explorer should've come with from the factory.
The switchback halos work great, the orange is so strong that they look like they are factory quality. The major issue I had here was that when the car was off or on put in Park, the car would do the "bulb outage" flashing (even with Forscan programming), and after a lot of pulling my hair, it turns out the halos have some sort issue with the ground wire. So I had to put each headlights turn signal on a separate car relay. Minor but annoying, and lots of extra wires. It's not like the engine room has a lot of extra space!
Ok, to the results. Pardon the dirty headlights, it looks like there's dirt inside, but it's all outside. (Ignore The vertical LED on the right, that's not part of this project and is just a
purchased DRL)
Everything off:
Halo (DRL) and headlight on:
Lights on, and turning:
Me pushing the "unlock" button:
Bonus picture of what the wiring on a soldered breadboard with a micro computer, resistors, voltage converters, etc looks like for the light strip to run on 12V:
So that's that project finished. I kept the old headlights in case it all goes bust, but so far so good.
I'm more than happy to answer any questions if someone is considering this kind of project, there's a lot of details I left out of "things learned". Total cost of all of this is probably well above $2000, considering all the stuff I bought and a lot that I didn't end up using. A "raw" cost would still be around ~$1000 for components alone. I honestly don't recommend doing this unless you drive in the dark a lot. Get a new car instead
