I like how my awesome post has devolved into this
Anyway, to answer the 1 question risen by my dismantling..
The answer is no. you can not stick a bulb in there without removing the glass. The plate is held in w/ an 'adjuster' screw (made for the foglight), and 2 little stainless steel screws. Any attempt on 'sticking in' a bulb would have metal shards in your housing. As well as an enormous and illegal glare problem (bad enough that im sure you would be pulled over).
IF you choose to remove the glass though (and I assure you, its VERY easy. cookie sheet, towel, 250 degrees, 7 minutes, CLOSELY monitored (obviously a firehazard)
Just lay the whole thing on a towel, then lay the towel on the cookie sheet. keep all edges of the towel INSIDE the cookie sheet.
The towel prevents the surface touching the cookiesheet to melt.
Just an update to all.
The wiring harnesses between US and German are COMPLETELY different. It has created issues that I will have to fix once I get to my car (which is still in storage).
The German spec had the highbeam, lowbeam, and city lights going into 1 large multi plug(They all shared the positive lead
). It also had a 6 prong multi plug for the headlight adjuster.
This is obviously nothing like the US spec. I desided that changing the low beam to 9006 made the most sense. I want to have the HID plug and plays installed at some point, I know we have had luck with these, and didnt want to try it with the german bulbs.
Foglights have their own harness connection, so they were a very simple plug and play.
Highbeams/City lights became the problem. There is no way to change the highbeam bulb to 9005 w/o losing the city lights. The housings are formed with the bulb socket.
What I desided to do, was cut the harness (damn) for both the Highbeams and City lights.
When I get to my car up north, I will make a harness plug to plug into the stock highbeam plug, and splice it onto the headlights.
The City lights (I believe, some one correct me if im wrong.) are supposed to work exactly like our parking lights. so I'll simply add a wire from our current parking lights, and harness them in.
And Voila! Glass lights! yay!
An interesting thing I found when I was dismantling the lowbeam cutoff bracket. Below is a diagram of the US cutoff pattern.
Driverside Passengerside
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (x being darkness, the lines being our cutoff)
xxxx_________ _____________
____/
The cut off pattern is not the same as you can see. It lowers on the drivers side, for oncoming traffic. The German spec lights had identical cutoffs on both sides of the car (they were both like our drivers side cutoff)
Not like this matters, but well, I thought it was interesting...US has a better cutoff pattern
