355 Xenon Kit Installation HOWTO

First off, thanks to the folks who gave me tips on this, but I wanted to record what I did so that others may find this information useful in the future.

This was installed in a '99 355 F1. I have no idea if this might vary for previous year models.

The installation looks awesome. Given that the 355 headlamps already have projector-style lenses in them, the installation looks almost OEM (despite the lack of auto-leveling). It is probably one of the best modifications you can make to the car for appearance and practicality. The lights are much brighter and do a materially better job of illuminating than the regular halogens. And they just look freakin' cool on the car.

I did try to take pictures, but for some reason they all came out horribly and it wasn't worth posting the pictures. At the very least, here are the steps I went through to install Xenon lights in the 355.

There are dozens of choices out there and I selected this company for the xenon kit based on the build quality of their ballasts which rely more on newer SMT technology. Plus they're thinner and nearly waterproof. I would highly recommend the 4300k. Going into the 5k or 6k range gives it too much of a blue tint and starts to give you that ricer-boy look, if you like that, go for it.

http://www.xtralights.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=1312

1. Raise the headlights. Disconnect the battery with the rotating switch in the trunk.
2. Remove the front headlight plastic by unscrewing the 4 screws on each headlamp.
3. Jack up the front of the car and get jackstands underneath.
4. Remove the front undertray on the driver or passenger side. There should be 5 or 6 screws on the bottom and one from the side right in front of the wheel.
5. Once you have the undertray off, look up and you'll see a thick black cable that goes into your headlight housing, it may have a yellow plastic clip on it. You want to disconnect that cable. This is the only cable that you should need to disconnect for the headlamp to be removed.
5. If you look at the arm linkage for the actual headlight pod that moves up and down and the motor that drives this, you'll see a single nut that is holding the linkage to the pod. You want to unscrew this. I did this from underneath with a small wrench on the driver side, but on the passenger side, given the battery location, I had to do this from above through the gap between the hood and the headlight housing.
6. Once you have the arm linkage unscrewed, hold up the headlight housing and put some pressure on the linkage to loosen it from the bolt. This will allow the headlight pod to move up and down freely. Without doing this, I didn't have enough clearance to remove the headlamp from the pod. I felt like I was putting way too much upwards pressure on the housing to get the headlamp removed.
7. Now raise the headlamp housing and there are three white plastic clips holding the headlamp in place. They're right next to the adjustment screws for the headlamp. Unclip those to loosen the headlamp. You might want to protect the front bumper area right in front of the headlight with some masking tape or an old t-shirt/towel as when you remove the headlamp you don't want to accidentally scratch your paint.
8. Now you can put some upward pressure on the headlight/pod housing and remove the headlamp in one piece. I ended up angling the top out first and then the bottom, being careful not to scratch the front bumper as it exited the housing.
9. Unclip and remove the regular bulb and stick in your new HID bulb.
10. Stick the headlamp back into the headlight housing, feeding the new cables from your new bulb through the headlight pod and back through the hole in the rear black wall.
11. You'll need to get underneath the car and inspect the cables to make sure everything looks okay.
12. Try connecting everything up including the ballast and turn the headlights on to make sure it works. You should have a beautiful white xenon light coming out of one of your headlights.
13. Turn the car back off and disconnect the battery again. Make sure the headlights were on when you disconnected the battery again to make the motors think they're in the up position.
14. Found a place to mount the ballast. Depending on your kit, you might have one of those double-sided sticky pads (which seems unsafe) or a mounting kit. Mine came with a nice metal mounting bracket which had a slot for me to mount it safely on one of the bolts holding the horn siren on the passenger side and the alarm siren on the driver side. Once mounted, I re-connected all the cables, made sure everything looked good.
15. IMPORTANT: Before you cable-tie any of the loose cables, have someone hold up the headlight housing at its full open height and make sure your cables have any slack. Now cable-tie everything this way. Otherwise you may end up stretching cables every time your headlights pop up and down.
16. Connect the arm linkage with the headlight in the up position (you may need someone to help you hold the headlight pod up while you screw the nut in.
17. Put the undertray back on and do the same steps on the other side.

Even fumbling around a bit as it was my first time working on a 355, I got it done in under 3 hrs. Feel free to post any questions or flames. I'm happy to try and answer them