The MINI Club of Ireland

Hi,

I have a '04 pre facelift JCW which has the pre facelift xenon headlights. I got a set of the upgraded xenons and am just wondering if I need to know anything about swapping them over, has anyone done this, and is it easy enough?

Any special tools reguired?
Anything I should know about the washers etc.
Can I simply 'plug' out the old ones and plug in the new ones?
Do I need to disconnect the battery?
etc.



Many thanks,
Alan

Hmmm. I've taken on my facelifted a few times for various jobs, but I've never worked with the pre facelifts. I'll try to answer your questions anyway.

Different connectors - I don't think they'd use them, from an economic point of view, it wouldn't make sense for them to change, so you should be okay. Nothing to worry about with the headlamp washers, they have no motor and are driven on water pressure only. You definitely definitely need to disconnect the battery. There are about 40000 volts running through a Xenon system.

I think someone asked this on another forum and they're just plug and play

Well, I did the headlight swap last weekend with my friend and everything went smoothly. The three nuts holding the headlights in were no trouble obviously, neither was the plug, and disconnecting the headlight washers was easy - just a clip. The most difficult part was getting the headlight washer unit away from the headlight unit itself, they were pretty tight but some fiddling and some WD40 did the trick.

Once refitted, it took a few squirts to get the water back to the headlight washers and that was about it! All relatively straightforward and the new bi-xenons look amazing and provide a noticeable amount of extra light when driving at night.

All in all it took us about 45 minutes and the only tools we needed was a vice grips and a screwdriver.

Happy days!