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Hi Guys,
I know this was done a couple years ago by Kissajew86 & WTVa, thank you to WTVa for all of his advice in doing this project. Thanks to Wavex for his advice and a good deal on the spare headlight. I decided when I did this that I wanted to also write up a DIY guide with some pics of it along the way to share. Here ya go!
What you'll need:
pair of projectors from '03-'05 R6
spare FZ6 headlight (optional, but recommended)
1/8" x 3/4" steel plate (mine came in a 3ft long section)
hack saw
dremel with metal cutting wheels (you'll need several)
flat black high temp spray paint
bench vice
threadlocker
quick-set epoxy
Step 1: Pull stock FZ6 headlight apart. I did this using my oven to melt the black silicon holding it together. Pre-Heat the oven to 350F. Turn the oven OFF. Place the headlight on a cool pan into the oven for 10 minutes. Remove prompty and pry the clear lense of the headlight off, careful not to break any of the retaining tabs. Then use the aiming/adjusting screws to remove the reflective housing.
Step 2: Prepping the R6 Projectors. You'll need to cut off the two tabs where the R6 used to mount to the adjusting screws of their original housing. Also remove the white-plastic thing with the screw in the middle. This screw is one of the places that you will be mounting your new brackets. HID conversion
I also chose to make the right set of projectors into low beams by creating cutoffs. If you remove the front of the projectors, you can remove the lense and see the cutoff behind them on the left headlight, but they are not present on the right headlight. Using several folds of aluminum foil, I was able to make the exact same shape as the cutoffs of the left headlight, paint it black, then place it in the right headlight projector. The catch is that the inner projector of the right headlight is not convex like the other three, it is a flat lense. You cannot creat a cutoff for this, so it will remain a highbeam light pattern, whereas the other three will run as lowbeam light pattern. In step 5, you can kind of see that this one lense is a different shape than the other three.
Step 3: Time to set up some mock brackets in the FZ6 housing that fit the R6 properly. I made mine out of cardboard. This will make fabricating the metal versions much easier later on. The two points where you will mount the two brackets are here indicated by red arrows. There are screws going into the projector housing at those locations that you will remove and put through a hole in the brackets with threadlock later.
Step 4: Now that you have a basic idea of what shape you'd like your brackets to be, it's time to make them out of metal. Keep in mind that these not only need to fit in the back of the headlight housing, but that they also need to clear the inside of the front/clear part of the housing which is a little smaller. It helps if you try to keep the projectors as far from the midline as you fit them. You also want to make sure that you are keeping the projectors straight up as you mount them. An easy way to tell is to look at the two screws on the back of the projectors where the bulb-retaining clip is located. Those two screws should line up straight up and down. Here are some pics of the brackets that I made after I painted them flat-black.
Making the brackets is a long, tedious process. Be patient. I used the hacksaw to make the general cuts as a dremel would take too long. After using the hacksaw, I used my bench vice to make the bends needed, using a piece of 2x4 as leverage to lean on the metal. I gave each bracket approximately 1 inch forward lift to meet the projectors from the adjusting bolts. I then used the dremel with cutting wheels to slowly grind away section of the bracket needed to get the proper fit and angle of the projectors. This involves repeated putting the brackets on the projectors and test fitting in the headlight housing, and then removing them to trim the brackets and try again until you get it right. Tedious, time consuming, and sometimes downright infuriating... but worth the effort. Not only is the shape important, but the whole that you drill into the bracket is equally important as this will determine the angle of the projector and it's relative position inside the headlight housing. Once you think you have it right, test fit the front half of the headlight housing to make sure it will clear the brackets that you've made. I had the most trouble getting it to clear the bottom bracket. Mounting the projector as high as possible relative to the top bracket would help avoid this situation for those that do it in the future.
Once you get it right, I epoxied the plastic adjusting screw nuts into place onto the brackets as they were not that snug on the brackets that I made. This will prevent them from shifting around later, causing the fit that you worked so hard on getting right to now be wrong.
Now that you have the brackets the proper shape and the plastic nuts epoxied (and dried), remove the brackets and spray them flat black. I chose to cover the plastic bits with tape so that paint would not get into the threading.
Step 5: Once the paint dries, it is time to put everything back together. I did one last test fit before final assembly to be sure nothing moved around. Now that I am sure it is all correct, I used threadlocker on the two screws that mount the brackets to the projectors. This stuff takes about 24 hours to cure, so you have plenty of time to get this moved around and mounted before worrying about this. Once the two brackets are mounted onto the projector, but before the threadlock dries, get the whole thing into the headlight housing with the plastic nuts onto the adjusting bolts. While you are doing this, try to get the projector aimed as close to where you want it as you can. Really this is just guessing because you'll need to adjust this later for fine tuning.
Step 6: Now that all of the moving parts are mounted into the back-half of the headlight housing. You want to gently press the front-half of the headlight housing onto the back-half, only enough to get it roughly lined up. Pre-Heat the oven to 350F again. Turn oven OFF and place headlight into oven on cool cookie-sheet for 10 minutes. Remove prompty and press the two halves together, carefully making sure all retaining tabs click into place. I used clamps to hold the two halves together while the silicon hardens.
Now that you have successfully created your FZ6 projector retrofit, it's time to put it on the bike. This is a relatively simple process and took me less than an hour. If you are careful, you don't even have to unhook any wires for the gauges or turn signals. First remove the inner fairings. By putting a towel on the front fender and gently lowering the entire front-fairing onto that nose-first, you should have enough slack in the wiring to negate disconnecting them. There are 5 screws holding the headlight housing to the front-fairing, one at each corner and one hiding at the top in the center behind the gauges. There are also 4 screws mounting the whole thing to the frame.
Here are some pics of the front disassembled and the two headlights side-by-side.
One point of information: stock bulbs include an H7 low beam and H4 high/low beam. The R6 projectors require two H7 bulbs, one for each side.
Here are some pics of the light output. The first is the stock bulbs with reflective housing with dual headlight mod. The second is HID conversion with reflective housing and dual headlight mod. The third is HID conversion with projectors, only one side running currently. You can see that even with only one side on, the light is projected MUCH further down the road.
As we know, the big advantage of projectors is how you can fit such a bright light into them without blinding traffic due to the clean cutoff they create. Here is a shot of the cutoff against my apartment building. I took a ride with these tonight and I am extremely happy with the result. I can see the road much further in front of me, even more so than my stock highbeams did before. The right headlight will also be used soon, but I didn't have a second H7 HID bulb yet.
wow Rob!!! That makes the front end look so much more aggressive!! and the light output difference between the before and after shots is impressive... very cool mod
wow Rob!!! That makes the front end look so much more aggressive!! and the light output difference between the before and after shots is impressive... very cool mod
Can you do it on my K4????
To be honest, this was a lot easier than I thought it would be. It was just really time consuming with all of the test fitting and adjusting of the brackets to make it all fit. If you find a projector that will fit in your K4 that you like, let me know. I'll be moving back down your way in a couple months anyway. Now that I know what I'm doing, I bet I could make a set of brackets in one afternoon. Of course, the case of beer I'd be drinking might slow me down a bit.
Looking at your current headlight Wavex, it looks like you have a reflective housing on top and a projector housing on the bottom. Which one is high versus low beam?
I think the high beam should be the projector, but I got them inverted right now lol
Anyway, I don`t think it`ll be feasible on mine, but I don`t really need it anyway... I like what Serraph is going to do though, i.e. add a blue angel light to his K5
Looking forward to finally going on a ride with you
No David. The projector is low beam and reflector on top of it is high. And i love the batman. I finaly am picking up paint tomorrow for my bike. Its all torn apart
this mod grows on me more and more, but realistically i cant find used projectors for a good price... and now from the last pic of the front end i think the bike looks like spider eyes... other then that great writeup and slickmove on baking your assembly to get it to disassemble! i prolly woulda just broke it into many pieces with a flathead screwdriver prying at different posistions... hahhaaaa
this mod grows on me more and more, but realistically i cant find used projectors for a good price... and now from the last pic of the front end i think the bike looks like spider eyes... other then that great writeup and slickmove on baking your assembly to get it to disassemble! i prolly woulda just broke it into many pieces with a flathead screwdriver prying at different posistions... hahhaaaa
Thanks, it still took a good amount of force to pull it apart even after being in the oven. It looks much more aggressive now than it did before, which I'm pretty darn happy about. The biggest thing is how it really projects the light further down the road than before, huge advantage to those of us who do a lot of night riding.
FZ6 R6-Projector Headlight Retrofit DIY
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