09 Civic G3 Retrofit

Depends on the law, it may be illegal to use the HID kit mentioned in this article on you vechicle. I'm not responsible for anything related to the use of this HID kit.

This DIY article is for informational purposes only. I'm not responsible for any damage related to the use of this DIY article.

The kit is called G3 (Generation 3) PnP Projector Kit. Don’t be confuse with the G1 kit you may saw on ebay and many other forums, this is the latest generation of the PnP projector kit, which has a much better performance than the cheapo (well, not necessary cheap, I did see some stupid people selling for $400+) G1 kit.

The top one is the G3, and the bottom one is G1.

The G3 (right) and G1 (left), you can see the G3 is a lot bigger than the G1.

The kit included a pair of bi-xenon projector with clear lens, CCFL angel eyes, HID bulbs, and relay harness. I didn’t order the kit with ballasts, as I have one already.

If you didn’t wash your car for awhile, I suggest you wash it a day before, so that it is dry and you won’t get too dirty when working on it.

The first thing to do disconnect the battery. Remove the –ve connector from the battery, then I used some latex glove cover it to prevent accidentally touch it.

Take the bumper off

Next is take the bumper off, so that you can take the headlight out and put the projector in. There are many resource on how to do that, so I’m not going to get into too much details. For people have sedan and never do this before, I highly suggest you watch the Fog Installation video at CollegehillsHonda (http://www.diyhonda.com/podcasts/episode145_civic_fog_lights.wmv).

Remove 5 clips and then remove the bulkhead cover.

To remove the clip, this tool is pretty useful. I forgot what is the name of it, but you should able to found it in Home Depot or any major hardware store.

Remove two socket bolt with T30 socket.

Remove 8 clips under the bumper. On first picture, there are two clips next to each other on the side, the inner one is the one you need to remove. The other one in the picture is a long clip. Then on 2nd picture, 4 clips in the middle, and one more long clip. The last picture shown the last clip you need to remove.

Remove two screws (one on each side, above the wheel), then you should be able to remove the bumper with some force.

Take the headlight out

There are 5 bolts you need to remove. Remove the 3 bolts in the bottom/side first, then remove the metal frame below the light, then remove the top 2 bolts. Be careful for the one marked in the 4th picture, there is chance that it will drop into the frame structure, and it is a real pain to get that out. Forget about the blue tape on the bolt in 2nd picture, I damaged the thread hole when I tighten it the first time, and now I got to add a couple more washers to make it work. Well, advice for first timer…. If you need to use a lot of force to tighten a bolt, it probably something wrong and you should stop, take the bolt out, then try again.

Disconnect all connectors and remove the signal bulb from the headlight, and one clip which holding the harness to the headlight, then you should able to remove the light from the car.

Open the headlight

Take all bulbs out, remove the rubber rings and vent cover, then cover the three bulb holes with painter tape.

To open it, you will need to apply heat to the headlight to soften the sealant. Many people put the headlight into oven, but my kitchen oven is not very big, and my wife will kill me if I put anything other than food into the oven. Luckily there is a suggested method in the manual for the G3 kit. Basically you have to put the headlight into a box, seal it, then use heat gun to blow hot air into the box to make it an oven. Don’t use a too big box, as you will wait forever to have it reach the required temperature. Also, make sure you are not blowing the hot air directly onto the headlight, as it may damage the light. For a box just a bit bigger than the light, like the one I used, it takes about 15 minutes, but it depends on the power of your heat gun.

While waiting, go get a thick glove and then put some disposable latex glove on top of the thick glove. When you open the light, the sticky sealant will get onto the glove. With a disposable glove on top, you are not going to waste your thick glove.

Use a flat screwdriver peel the tabs, then tear apart the front lens from the back housing. Use the screwdriver to help on start. If you heat the light up enough, it should be pretty easy. Just keep your eyes on the tabs and make sure it is peeled. If it didn’t move even you use some force, it may indicate you need a bit more time to bake it.

Put the projector in

The first thing to do is remove the reflector from the housing. There are three locations to hold the reflector. The first one to release is the one hold by the adjustment bolt. Use a 10mm socket to release it.

The next one is in the middle of top side. Small bended needle nose pliers is my favorite tool to press the locking tabs and release it.

The final one is on the low beam side on the top side. This is the same one as the middle one, but it is almost impossible to press the tab. I just use some force to rip it apart. After you take the reflector out, you can unscrew the tab holder and release the tab, than put it back to the back housing.

Next is to remove the halogen bulb cover and the bulb holder at the back. Simply remove the screws and you can take those out.

Now, take the projector out from the kit package, then disconnect the solenoid/angel eye wire. Use a small screwdriver to remove the lock for the bulb and remove the bulb from the projector. Then remove the washer and nut from the back of the projector. Notice that there is a notch on the washer, which should align with the groove on the projector marker as “Top”.

There are four wires on the solenoid connecter. Use a small screwdriver or any sharp narrow object to push on the tab on each pin in the connector, and pull the wires out from the connector. Pay attention to which wire going to which position, or if you are not confident, put a sticker on each wire labelling each pin from 1 to 4.

Feed the solenoid wire through the hole which used to attach the halogen bulb cover, then push the 4 wires back into the connector. Insert the projector through the 9006 hole. Put the washer from the back, with the notch on the washer align with projector. Then put the washer and nut and tighten it.

Then put the reflector (now with the projector) back to the housing.

Wiring

Now, let’s put the headlight aside temporary and connect the wire.

There are two relay harness come with the kit, one for each projector. One of the harness (the top one in the picture) is longer than the other, which should be used for the passenger side.

There are multiple connectors on the harness. The plug is used to connect to the ballasts. The two ring terminals are used to connect to the +ve of battery and ground. Blue wire pair is high beam trigger, and white wire pair is low beam trigger. Don’t worry about which one is for +ve and which one is for –ve, they work in either way. The Red/Black wire is used to provide power to the CCFL angel eye, Red is +ve and Black is –ve. And finally, the 4-pin plug is used to connect to the Angel Eye / Solenoid connector from the projector.

The simplest way to connect the low beam, high beam, and angel eye wires are splice the corresponding wire on the OEM harness, so white pair to low beam, blue pair to high beam (and remove the fuse 37 to disable the DRL), and most common way to power the angel eye will be splice into the park light wire. You can just use the wire splicer come with the kit to make the connections. With this simplest wiring, please remember to disable the DRL by pulling the fuse #37 from your under dash fuse box.

I didn’t want to damage the OEM harness, and I also want to keep the DRL function, so here is what I made.

To make this, you will need to get 1x 9005 male plug (blue), 1x 9006 male plug (grey), 1x 9005 female plug (black with blue rubber), 2x relay sockets, 1x SPST relay, 1x SPDT relay, a small pc board, 2x diode, 1x capacitor, and a couple t-tap splicer and quick connectors if you don’t want to solder all the connections. Below is the circuit diagram.

The diode and capacitor is used to convert the PWM signal from DRL to a constant 12V. For people don’t know, PWM is a means to dim the high beam bulb, by switching the power between on and off rapidly. You can’t power the CCFL with the raw PWM power, as the rapid on/off cycle will damage it. The converted DRL power will then used to trigger a relay to switch on the CCFL.

I want the angel eyes on only when DRL is on, which means it will on whenever low beam is off. If you want it on all the time, you can put one more diode in the circuit and splice the park light wire to it, but it will require you to put splicer to the OEM wire.

With the wiring harness ready, the next thing to do is mount the ballasts and connect all the wire. I didn’t take a lot of pictures for this part, as I already have my ballasts mounted long time ago and I’m too lazy to remove them to take pictures. Just mount it at whatever way you want, like how you do for a PnP kit. The following picture shows where I put mine.

Driver side.

Passenger side.

Where the +12V terminal connected.

Where the Ground for Driver side connected. That’s the G1 in Honda manual, which is near the bottom of the battery.

I forgot to take a picture on where to connect the passenger side Ground, so I just use one of the Honda manual picture. I connected the ground to G202 on the picture.

Adjust the projector

There is not too much you need to adjust. You are going to use the original adjuster to adjust the up and down, and left/right is fixed as the projector just bolt onto the 9006 bulb hole. The only thing left is rotation. While the washer already keyed as 9006 bulb, it still can be rotate (same as 9006 bulb).

First mount the headlight, without the front lens, back to the car.

Connect the ballasts output to the projector, which using AMP connector like all other PnP kit, and also connect 4-pin connector for the angel eye and solenoid. Then connect the ground terminal back to the battery. Time to test run the projector.

As you can see from the picture, seems the driver side is tilted. So just use your hand to slightly rotate the projector and correct it. You should still able to rotate it with force applied on both side of the shroud.

Seal the headlight

We are almost done. Remove the headlight from the car. Before put the front lens back, use some canned compress air to make sure the is no dust attached to the inside, both the front lens and the back housing. You may also use some lint-free cloth to clean the front of projector lens and the reflector/shroud, make sure there is no finger print on them.

A tube of sealant is provided with the kit, but I don’t bother to use it and just use the original sealant. Use heat gun to heat the sealant up to soften it. Don’t heat one spot for too long or you will melt the housing. I try to heat a spot for about 2 seconds, then move to the right and keep doing that until you go around the headlight for 3 cycles, at that time the sealant should be soft enough.

Put the front lens on top of the housing. Start from the signal light side first. After the lens is positioned ok, use your heat gun to heat the side while you put pressure on the lens to make a tight seal. Use as many clamp as possible, but it works ok even I only have two. I just keep moving the clamp to the newly heated area.

After the headlight cooled, turn it over. Use the rubber cover on the bulb wire to cover back of the projector, then put the original rubber ring over it to keep it tight. Also remember to put the rubber ring back to high beam hole, and the rubber vent cover too.

Put the headlight back to the car, connect all the wires, then turn on the light one more time to make sure everything works (low beam, high beam, signal light, angel eyes). You don’t want to found that you forgot to connect a wire after you put the bumper back.

Now when everything works, put the bumper back by just reversing the order when you took it off. Some advices….

(1) When you put the bumper back, make sure the bottom of the bumper is at the bottom layer (refer back to the picture which showing the clips). The clips should be easily inserted and locked, if you found it is very difficult to insert it or lock it, you probably have somewhere of the bumper bottom not in right position.

(2) When you put the two screws on top of the wheel , be careful don’t let it fall into the fender. You will have to take part of the bumper off in order to get it back.

Conclusion

Here is how the final light installed. The bulb is 4300K and not blue in color, it looks blue just because I took the picture when it just switched on. Also, they are took after I installed it the first time, which I have the angel eyes wired to the Park light.

And how the modified cutoff looks like.

The G3 is not going to be the best projector in the world, but I would say at the moment, it is the projector retrofit solution with the best price/performance ratio, while still give you acceptable HID projector performance. If you are looking for the best performance, it is not for you and you should go looking for some better parts and have a DIY or get professional to retrofit for you, and pay the premium.

But if you are looking for an acceptable performance solution and don’t want to pay a lot of money, I highly recommend this G3 kit.