I was looking at throwing some cosmetic items onto my X-type like the trunk lip, mesh grill and some Xenon bulbs for the headlights and fog lamps. Any members out there know from experience the cheapest places to go for these items but decent quality. I am more or less trying to go for the X-Types Sport look. Also anyone have advice on how hard these items will be to install or have a how 2 vid they can send me? I don't have much free time so it's either work on it piece by piece or spend the money to have these items done by a shop.

 

Mesh grill, if you get an entire grill and not just the inserts, under 5 minutes; trunk lip spoiler, about 15 minutes (strip the wax, measure a couple of times to make sure it is going where you want it to...once it is down, it isn't moving.

Both for me from EBay, the spoiler lip is Chinese, the grille came from a breaker (junkyard) in the UK.

Don't cheap out on the xenons, it is time consuming to install them, so go for good parts, Maxlux is a good bet.

 

So it looks like the Maxlux is just bulbs which is perfect because I don't want to deal with changing out harnesses. Is it the same bulbs for the fogs as well?

 

You will need both bulbs and ballasts, but the actual install is pretty much plug and play, other than getting the high-tension wires from the ballast into the headlight housing.


Since it is all apart anyway, and especially if you need to rebuild the auto-aimers on the headlights, route the factory headlight harness out of the housing (easiest to just cut it and put a new connector on the existing fitting). Then route the HV into the housing (you need to hog out the hole that the existing wire goes through, when you are done pulling the wire through, use an aircraft-grade RTV to reseal the hole)...


The existing headlight connectors plug into the ballast, the new HID connectors plug into the ballast on one side, and the HID capsule on the inside of the lamp housing.


The only other consideration is running a new ground lead to each housing, because the existing harness daisy-chains the blinker ground to the headlight harness that you just removed.

 

thanks for all the help thus far wa3ra. I was wondering if any company offers any premium bulbs that just replace the OEM one's but have the same effect? I am trying to more or less just get something that I can throw in and call it a day. I am going for Hyper White for the headlights and blue for the fogs.

 

You don't say what motor type you have, but if its a V6 then the 3 liter S chrome exhaust tips are a great visual upgrade and take minutes to fit.