Not for the weak heart, not especially when it cost $550 SGD per headlight, and the process of splitting the headlight housing and the lens will turn off anyone unless you are a hardcore DIY enthusiast.

This is just a picture of a headlight that I managed to get hold, and splitted them into two as shown. The process is tough, because you need to use industrial dryer to melt the sealant that firmly binds the lens and the housing together. The sealand is so tough that splitting the lens and housing is a PITA job!

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When I first saw this mod in vwvortex, I was very excited, because it look so elegant and OEM. My first reaction was, “Hey, how can VW ever missed this equipment in their factory assembly line, they should compensate their customers with a recall!”

Of course, the reaction was made in a jest, but very soon, the plan of action is very clear; to get this modification realised by hook or by crook. The thought of installing this W8 dome light myself is also quite taunting. You see, everything that I touched, will either break or become dysfunctional.

But the DIY spirit prevails, and the result was one of the most satisfaction, from all mods I have performed so far.

First thing first, parts required

More about the parts

Our stock wire harness is made to connect to a domelight that uses 3-pin plug, and to install W8 domelight, we need to modify so that the stock harness is re-wired to connect to the W8 dome light that uses 6-pin plug.

The parts required are shown in the diagram above (with the exception of led bulbs, not shown). Of the 6 items listed, two of them are optionals. The 3 pin plug housing (893971993) and the female repair wire (893971993, as indicated by the red arrow in the diagram on the left) are required only if you intend to build an adapter (between stock harness and 6 pin plug housing in the W8 domelight), instead of splicing and cutting the existing harness.

Detailed steps

1. Remove the plastic cover from the stock panel, and you unscrew the screws shown in the photo, pointed by the red arrows.

2. Pry open the stock panel. I did the wrong way and end up more effort required to take out. You should be prying first at the 2 points pointed by the red arrows.

3. When the stock panel is taken out, remove the overhead light visor too so that you can run a wire through that area.

4. Once you managed to run the wire through the edge of the windscreen, push the wire down the a-pillar.

5. Run the wire (for dimmer) into the roof fabric linen and through the edge of the roof to the a-pillar.

6. Open the side cover where the fuse box is. You need to access to the bottom of the A-pillar in order to complete the running of the dimmer wire.

As a safety precautious, you may want to take out fuse #14 at the same time, so that any wrong wiring you made in the next few steps (touch wood!) does not blow off your fuse, and you are modifying on a open circuit environment.

7. From the bottom of A-pillar, get hold of the dimmer wire, and pull down long enough so that you can tap on the eur switch later on

8. Remove the euroswitch and unplug the switch. If you are not familiar on how to remove the euroswitch, simply push in the knob and turn the knob to the center position, and pull out the euroswitch.

You will get to see a set of wires, and basically the blue-gray wire that the dimmer wire needs to tap on is pointed by the red arrow points in the diagram. It should be the wire in the position #17.

9. To make sure I got the right wire tapped, I just do a temporary tapping and move on to working on the rest of the wirings & connections.

10. Since I have 2 of the repair wires (000 979 103, bronze tip), I cut them into half, and plug the 3 wires into the housing as shown.

This step is optional and can be skipped if you are not building an adapter.

11. Next I work on the new 6-pin plug. The terminals of the repair wire (000 979 131) should be fitted into position 1, 3, 4 and 5. You will see a small number writing on the plug as pointed by the various colored arrows. (red:1, blue:3, green:4, yellow: 5).

12. We are ready to create the adapter now.

Once all the repair wires are fitted into the 6-pin plug and 3-pin housing, connect the wires up! The wire #1 should leave as it is as we will be connecting it to the dimmer wire later on.

• Wire #4 connects to the stock brown wire (or the wire #1 in the housing).
• Wire #5 goes to stock blue-red wire (or wire #2 in the housing).
• Wire #3 goes to blue-gray (or wire #3 in the housing).
• Wire #1 will be linked to the dimmer wire later

Note that if you are not creating an adapter, and have skipped step 10, you need to tap the wires (000 979 131) directly onto the stock harness wires.

13. Plug the stock harness into the 3 pin-plug housing. Tap wire #1 to the dimmer wire as shown

14. Test the connection, you should have all switches and buttons working accordingly. The led should also lit up when you turn your euroswitch. If everything is okay, tidy up the wirings, use wire connector if possible, and fit the panel back to the roof linen.

15. Put the W8 domelight back to the roof linen. The domelight is mounted and held on the roof via 2 metal clips behind. Here's a view of the domelight when euro switch is turned on at stage 1 position.

16. All the lights are in action by turning the euro switch to full position. You should also test if the light turns on/off when you open and close the doors.

finally, if you have the wedge-type led bulbs, you will achieve the following effect

Other references

1. VWvortex's SoFlaJetta W8 DIY guide
2. Hillside Imports' [Official W8 Overhead console install
3. Cars & Cars Part department (Singapore VW dealer)
4. Alternate part supplier: Hillside Imports
5. Alternate part supplier: Tmtuning.com
6. Additional information from Vwvortex

To be published soon …

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All sports cars come with flashy fog light. Alright, this is just an ego statement. But being someone who emphasis alot on the styling of my ride, I find my ride missing with some thing, just like a lady going into glamourous party without putting on mascara. Oh wait, yes, there is no fog light on my ride. Nevermind that I have already upgraded my stock headlight to HID one, doesn't matter that my HID is so bright that fog light serve little purposes. I just need to complete that look!

With my projektzwo front bumper, there is no aftermarket fog lights that could fit onto my bumper without any customisation. Ong Hock Chye's Ah Soon, the man who made my day with the HID retrofitting, came to rescue once more. He did a very good salesman talk on me, convincing me that I should just go with Hella MicroDE Universal fog light system, and he will take care of the rest of customisation.

True enough, his words are his commitment. And the results show why he's the man when it comes to customisation job!

Obviously, you need to remove the bumper. The wiring to the fog light will basically be leveraging from the existing stock wire relays, which already had provision for fog light in the stock headlight, but are no longer used because of the HID headlight retrofit.

Ah-Soon did a fantastic job in finding a good position for the fog light to be mounted securely. Look closely into the pictures below, you realised that the fog lights are just mounted on one of the bumper internal structure! Clever move!

Close up of the fog light and its mounting position

Tapping the wires from the existing headlight harness

By the way, Ah soon did another salesman talk on me and I was led by the nose basically, as I also upgraded my HID bulb to Philips Cool Xenon 6000K!

Front view of my ride with fog light fitted

More pictures will be uploaded soon, to show the setup when completed, and the differences between 4100K and 6000K HID lumination.

To be published soon …

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You need to be warned. Car modification is quite a contagious disease, and according to some folks, is a variant of enzyme. It can be incurable unless you have the ancedote, which I will talk about it in my next article.

Shortly after I have upgraded my 17″ MOMO wheel, the modification itch came back again, within 24 hours. The thoughts of sound damping and proofing my cabin so that I feel like I am driving a Lexus have been lingering around for a long while, and I just feel like as if floodgate has opened, and I just got to continue my modification plan.

Honestly speaking, our cars (Volkswagen BORA) are quite well sound proof'ed and dampen'ed when they came out from factory, at least for the non audiophiles. But it doesn't mean there's no further room for improvement, and I have decided to approach Express Motion Pte Ltd for their professional advise.

Basics
The terms sound proofing & sound damping are sometimes mis-understood as the same. Sound-proofing is a technique that makes use of sound-absorbing material to eliminate noise or keep as much noise as possible out of the cabin. Sound-damping on the otherhand, make use of visco-elastic material to reduce or eliminate noise as a result of vibration energy being disperse from a structural part of the vehicle, such as door panel or boot panel.

Different individuals, armed with each of their own sound proofing/damping objectives, will have different noise control requirements. Not being an audiophile, I do not need to damp all possible cabin body surface area when they might just yield minimal vibration energy. This, however, might be a big deal for audio enthusiast, so please check out your requirements and objectives before embarking on such project.

Scope of work .. sound proof + damping
My high level objective is er .. to transform my car cabin into a Lexus cabin. Obviously, you pay a peanuts, you get a monkey. (although I beg to differ on the fact that I am getting every penny that I have paid to the dealer), hence, unless I throw my money on a new Lexus car, I had set my expectation to a more practical level. I told the boss of Express motion that I just need a quieter cabin, and better audio environment, in that order of priority.

I was recommended to dampen my front wheel arch, sound proof my floorpan, and damper my front side doors. On the hindsight, I think I might get even better result if I had sound proof my wheel arch, instead of damping it.

The process was quite laborious, and elaborated. The merticulous workers had to removed all the seats (front and back), as well as the seat frames, so that the floor carpet can be unlaid. When they uncover the carpet, I observed that there's a moderately thick layer of sound absorber material beneath the carpet, and that's why I suggested that our cars are already sound proofed (at certain level) from the factory.
The material that the workers used to sound proof my floorpan is Accumat AMT250, which is 0.250″ thick noise control material used purely to reduce or eliminate noise. Unfortunately, at the time when I was doing my sound-proofing, my digital camera just ran out of battery, and I couldn't take any picture of the process.

As the workers proceed to work on the door sound damping, they have to slowly remove the door panel. I notice that one can actually DIY on the door sound damping easily, if you can comprehend the steps[/b] described by [url=http://forums.vwvortex.com/zerouser?cmd=viewprofile&id=49760]VgRt6. Soundproofing your floorpan will be alittle tricky, so I suggest you leave it to the professional unless you are a true DIY man. The material used for damping the door is the same as that for the wheel arch, which is Accumat AMT045 , very much thinner than the soundproofing material. It's evident that the material is not meant to fend off any noise, but reduce noise via reducing unnecessary vibration of the body parts. On by the way, as you are taking out the door panel, becareful when you pull out the panel from the door, the clips may snap and break if you do not pull out properly. It's better if you prepare yourself with spare clips, (P/N: 3B0 868 243) which cost less than $1 each.

The arrows point to the clips that are vulnerable for breakage

Wheel arch sound damping is also quite straight forward, you just need to turn the wheel so that you have access to the torx screws that secure the wheel arch cover. Once the cover is removed, it exposes the metal frame of the wheel arch body. We used the same damping material as we did for the door panel.

All in all, the work was nicely done up by Express Motion within 3 hours, considering that they have been careful in dismantling the parts and trims just to lay the damping or proofing material. The price is a friendship price, so it's non-disclosure. But you possibly can get it done at less than a grand, a full sound proofing/damping (including the boot and rear door/wheel arch) will probably set you back by $1400.

Other references
1. VgRt6's DIY guide on door removal
2. Express Emotion Pte Ltd @ Upper Thomson Road
3. Accumat product page