Can Halogen Headlamp Assy be Retrofitted with HID?

Man, what a minefield... just to start unpacking....

Halogen headlight buckets are meant for halogen bulbs. The optics are calibrated for that filament, and there is no glare shield needed because halogen sources aren't bright enough to require one.

HID buckets are different. HID burners have very different mount bases from halogen bulbs, for several reasons. One of them is to prevent the use of HID burners from being used in halogen buckets. Needless to say, this has not stopped the outlaw cottage industry of disassembling new HID burners and reassembling them onto bases meant for halogen bulbs to create something that was never supposed to exist.

HID buckets are set up to work with automatic beam leveling systems, which are legally required for HID usage. It's not clear to me whether the halogen bucket would work the same way. Sometimes the leveler system is built into the bucket, sometimes it is a separate part.

Be careful mixing and matching, you could wind up in a weird situation with aftermarket buckets where you require the handmade HIDs with halogen bases, only to have the car disable the headlight because it isn't getting a self-test signal back from a leveler assembly that is no longer present.

I use ordinary clear coat paint after polishing headlight lenses. Adds ~24 months to the effect.

 

Short answer: YES!

Longer answer.
The lenses are attached to the rest of the headlight assembly using similar glue that holds your windshield on. If you place the headlight assembly into an oven preheated to 200 degrees F for about 7 minutes, the glue will soften and you'll be able to remove the lens. If lenses on the aftermarket assemblies are the same shape as your stock HID ones, you can remove the hazy originals from the stock buckets, remove the clear lenses from the aftermarket (halogen) buckets and swap them out. You can buy the new glue strips in an auto parts store or just re-use the old stuff by loosely re-assembling the lens and the bucket and placing the 200 degree oven for 7 minutes, then pressing everything back together while it cools. Attached are pictures of my halogen assemblies opened up in order to retrofit HID projectors into them. Your project is a bit different, but the lens removal tips my prove to be useful.

If all else fails, you can purchase an HID projector kit for $150 from "TheRetrofitSource" and do what I did to the aftermarket halogen assemblies.

Also, I saw a YT video about buffing the lenses out and covering them with something that somewhat replaces the original clear coat and protects the lenses after they've been buffed. I have not personally tried buffing out lenses (my '07 was lucky to keep clear so far).

IMG_1187 by VFerdman posted Dec 3, 2018 at 2:32 PM

IMG_1186 by VFerdman posted Dec 3, 2018 at 2:32 PM

IMG_1185 by VFerdman posted Dec 3, 2018 at 2:32 PM

 

Halogen assemblies DO have a glare shield, but it's very different than HID. I had to remove the glare shield on my halogen assemblies to retrofit the projectors. It's not a big thing, but it prevents the halogen bulb from shining up and forward. The high beam turns on a second filament that is located so as to bypass the shield and shines up into the reflector. Forward is blocked by a cup-shaped piece of steel.

 

Fair enough, yes they do use glare shields in some halogens. But it's not at all like in (some) HIDs where the glare shield actually moves to change the beam from low to high.

Overall I like the idea of a lens-only-swap. I would expect the rest of the native toyota HID bucket to be higher quality than anything aftermarket.

Plus, when you've got a car with actual legal HIDs it seems awful to hack it up with outlaw parts.

 

I agree, but the HID Gen 2 lights are not projectors and therefore may not be super-friendly to head-on traffic. They are DOT compliant, though and you can't shake a stick at that. I love my projector conversion (compared to the stock halogens), but it lacks leveling and I am not sure how that affects anything as I have had a full car (4 adults and one kid in a car seat) at night on two way roads and no complaints from oncoming traffic, nor did I see the cutoff line wander up into the tree tops. If I had stock HID, I'd try to keep them, though.