Super interesting setup today we're doing a mitsubishi eclipse 4th gen. So this is something that i've done years and years ago, but i haven't ever done the set that has a projector in there and this was done by another another shop, another dude for elise there. She is we're going to talk about the story of these eclipse lights, because one of the main things that happens when you build custom lights. Is you go into it blind? You don't really know what you're supposed to know, because why would you right and you're kind of just going to go down a different rabbit hole, maybe than you should? Because it's the only one that you know exists, so we are going to be asking all kinds of questions about how these lights started.

Why they look, how they look and some of the different changes that we're going to make and that's all with our friends, elise. You got your eclipse uh how long ago um in 2019, okay - and you just wanted to do some of the headlights. So what was the first thing that happened when you started looking into it um i saw an ad i've been wanting to do it for a long time, but i didn't know where to go. I didn't know who to talk to because i just i don't know anyone with lights and then on instagram.

It popped up an ad for lighting trends and i was like that looks pretty i like these lights. Let me go to them, and so i got the lights then i realized, i didn't know how to install them. So i just looked up someone. I actually found a couple people on offer.

I got burned a few times i put in a deposit and they stopped talking to me. I didn't know that yeah yeah um and then i found one person, the first person who said yes, i was like okay, great someone and i drove really far and um. I ended up having to drive there like five times because of a bunch of problems when they actually did the work. Did you have any input on how anything was going to be routed, or did you just kind of show them the parts get this way? It was, it was a good teamwork.

I um i said like i wanted to do something cool and again i didn't know where to start so i asked a lot of his advice and he was like you know. We could do something cool like this, so it was a team effort and i said yeah it was he was. He was good about like helping to make sure i was happy. So we've got black paint, that's in there, but that fuming the little hazing on the inside of the lenses at least didn't know that she was not a bad thing, but how did that go uh? It didn't get better.

It got worse, so now we're here. So i can try to do something and maybe get these at least moderately better than they are. But what did you use when you were cleaning them? Microfiber, whispered, microfiber? So that's the right thing to use as far as the cloth itself, no like windex or alcohol. No, i just i first just tried to brush off and then um i halfway through.

I was watching your video and you said not to do what i was doing yeah and so i stopped that makes sense. So the cool thing is, she didn't use rubbing alcohol. So we can potentially save these things, because if you use rubbing alcohol it eats that coating that has that hazing in it. Now you can see a couple little wipe marks that are in there, but we'll see as i go one of the things that sucks about getting lights done locally.

Is that there's always a time limit, and so one of the issues that happened with these lenses is the lights, were custom painted now a thing that kind of kills me kind of it makes me so sad for the dude that built these. Is he didn't know that they were black plastic and if you've been on this channel for very long, you know that zap, oh it just eats the chrome off and there's black underneath and then it's done. It's painted it's black. It's perfect ready to go! No waiting for things to dry or cure, or anything like that, but you didn't know this - lay down damn dude.

This is good tape. This adhesive on there is insane. Basically, all we're going to do now is just throw this thing in the bucket and see what happens. I just didn't want to hold the camera too fast.

I lasted you good, that's so funny. I probably have it all over me too. The black of the plastic looks so much better than his paint. The nice thing about the degreaser.

There's no fumes, there's nothing that you're trying to dry so like you could just strip apart and then immediately. Stick it back in there after it's dry and like you're, done perfect paint. So these are actually factory lights and let me know in the comments, if you have either a 4g eclipse - or you know anybody that does like how rare are these things for you, i've. Never seen them, i made some lights for an eclipse 10 plus years ago.

They did not have a projector. They just had the big open, like reflector housing with that weird little blue lens, but these things definitely have a really unique look and i'm gon na show. You the difference in my idea for our plan on these versus what we have here on the bench right now now. One of the main issues here was that this strip over time has started to experience.

Some failure, which is super common with addressable leds, doesn't look like. We have any issues with these angel eyes, but i've got plans for them too started out just like one led and then it turned into four and then it turned to getting to the very end of the strip. So it started pretty fast, but it was a slow um, slow degradation. Yes there it is there's the word, so here's the rings that are in there now now.

This has a acrylic cover and the unfortunate thing, even though these things really do fan the light out, and they make the little pixels look way. Cooler, next to each other problem is that they often have to be glued or held on in place by some sort of like a bead wire or something like that. Now just have little places like there's a little gap right here in the ring so that it can be situated where the wires would be running out. The bottom of this, but unfortunately you can kind of see stuff like that when it's mounted in the housing.

So, just a tip for anybody that wants to use these kind of ring covers like that. Try to hide those gaps so that they're not as visible from the outside, but in our case we're going to use a completely different ring. This is something from our dude sinister retroworks, and these have this nice cover where it's integrated in it's actually kind of like the profile prism uh that little like coating on the top. But it's a hard coating.

It's not soft and it looks super super clean and consistent, and we've got three wires in three wires out, so that is gon na make it to where our addressable setup is way easier to work with. That's the strip that's in there and it's wrapped around in a way, it's very similar, like i've, seen a lot of 350z lights with these tubes on there. So we're going to do a completely different look where we just wrap it along the bottom and we're going to do it until we get a really nice outcome where it just looks nice and clean running right there. So it's not going to be too different, but we will have the new 80 millimeter addressable rings there in the center it'll just be a little bit more subtle.

What do you think would look better um? Should we keep this inside little reflector right here? Chrome, because we could see it right here, probably a little bit better, keep the chrome for extra reflection or just ditch it all and keep a more black look. We ditch it all right. Well, the cool thing is it. I believe it very much looks like it's.

The same black plastic, so instead of using this, as it sits right now, we'll just dip it in the zep and post it on tick, tock, all stripped the next day, permaseal now look. I actually had a bunch of permaseal that i found in the light that we'd already been messing with not realizing that the original guy that modified these lights for elise never actually pulled out that permaseal. So this housing right here has already been completely been rid of all the permaseal. This one has not so this is the original layout that was in there.

That's the original rings and paint all that stuff. So we are going to do to this light. What i've already done to that light before we can reseal them, because i bought some brand new depot lights that have a perfectly fresh lens on them. We'll take this thing apart and then score just the lens off of it and add it over here to this guy.

So it looks all perfect and the first thing i'm going to do is take a look at this is the bezel and you can see it actually sits into place not inside of the lens there's not like any screw holes or anything to put it into the Lens so the lens will actually go on after the bezel does once i put it into place on that now. This, however, has a good amount of damage to it on the back side, which is not good, we've got some whatever was used to try to seal this up. It's definitely not going to cut it. I'm just kind of peeling everything off by hand right now, so one downside to working after somebody else is you're going to have all the little imperfections that come with their work.

Whatever that happened to have been, and then you are going to be now responsible for it, so let's just say i didn't realize what's about to happen before i actually do it and it was kind of shocking it might be looked at as it's my fault. Okay, there's nothing. I can do to this strip to get it to be removed without damaging the paint that it's on top of. I know this because the paint was shot the same day that this tube was put on it, and even if it wasn't, there's no way that that tape is going to bond really well to this bezel without it getting messed up when you remove it, that paint Is going to come up with the strip right now, if i'm amazing i'll get off a couple pieces of the strip that won't take paint with it and ultimately it's just going to kind of let go all at once.

Here's another sad thing: the dude ran the jst connector right through the housing and he just left a big giant hole there, and that was all just for the sake of being able to fit this big black plastic thing through when he could have de-pinned it right. There and made a much smaller hole but uh. He sure made it easy for him. That strip is off.

This is our residue. It actually didn't break off more than just this one little section of chrome. I don't have a super fine grit, blasting media. I should have soda i've got cole slag, it's very abrasive, very uh like it's like etchy it like kind of etches all of this stuff.

So this does not look fantastic and it will, after it gets painted with some satin black, nothing that looks bad. It's gon na look dope when it's done, but here's this is like the tragic thing, look how good it could have looked now. This has been stripped. It's been dipped in degreaser, and it's now going to have to go in here so that it matches this.

But it was just kind of a test to see what would have happened if dude took these things straight out and just dipped them in that zip. Very quickly we saw how fast it dissolved. It was insane. They could have looked absolutely perfect in a nice gloss black finish, but that's not the way that this one went.

What do you think about this? I'm making a new tick tock right now, where i show mounting the ring so that it'll fit and look all super perfect, but uh came out pretty good excited to share all right. So here are the first set of the addressable lights that i've done. Elise already had these, she had cool addressable stuff, but i never make addressable. So this has been kind of a challenge not just for working with addressable, because i use very basic stuff.

I use the angel eyes from sinister those were awesome and then we use the flow series tubes from lighting trends. So those all just plugged in and played really nice they're, all powered by the blue ghost and now we're going to be able to hook up different functions on the car, such as like the parking light, that'll turn on white, and then it can do the turn Signal and do all sorts of stuff and meanwhile elise can control everything with her phone, so she's uh modeling, the phone app sparkle is pretty crazy, so lots of options playing with the bluetooth stuff. But we want to be able to turn some cool things on as well, so we're gon na use the extra features in the blue ghost and that's gon na just be something we pick up later. So we'll revisit this, we'll go out to the eclipse, shoot some cool video with elise in la and i don't know - maybe have cool things in the background we'll see.