Fitting LED Eyebrows on an IS200

steviewevie

09-05-2016, 08:50 AM #1

Here is a brief guide on fitting LED "eyebrows" to an IS200. You can get 12V LED strips off eBay easily enough, one with 24 LEDs is typically the right size for an IS200.

However, it is not safe to just directly wire these into the car's electrical system, one member's car nearly caught fire at WIM when his directly-wired LEDs short-circuited ! You need to wire a fuse in-line with the LEDs, for safety reasons.

I used a waterproof inline fuse-holder from Maplin, plus a 160mA quick-blow glass fuse. Attach this to the positive wire of the LEDs. You will probably be able to work out which wire is which by loooking closely inside the plastic strip, e.g as per the picture below where you can see from the plus sign at one end that the left-hand electrode of each LED is positive, and it is the copper-coloured wire in my example that is therefore the positive lead. If you can't work it out, just try touching the wires onto the battery terminals in the car, to work out which is positive.

[Image: eyes1.jpg]

LED strip with fuse-holder wired in to positive lead :

[Image: eyes2.jpg]

The LED strip is easily attached on top of the headlight, using double-sided sticky tape (I used 3M double-sided tape). I had to trim down the plastic encasing the LEDs slightly to squeeze the strips under the grey plastic clips of the headlights.

[Image: eyes3.jpg]

The positive wire of the LEDs needs to be connected to the positive wire of the lighting system. I used the sidelights, so that my LED strips come on in conjunction with the sidelights. The LEDs won't work if the polarity (plus/minus) is the wrong way round (though you won't damage them if you get it wrong). On my car the positive wire is the green connector.

Use your favourite method to connect the wires, but I highly recommend soldering them properly. I initially used scotchlocks but I soon started having trouble with dodgy connections, so I took them off and soldered them properly. What I did was to cut the green OEM wire, strip back insulation at both ends, thread on some heatshrink tube, wrap the LED wire onto this, solder them together, pull the heatshrink over the joint and use a hairdryer to end up with a (relatively) neat solution.

It's easier if you remove the sidelight from the holder while doing this, gives you a bit more room to play with. Also you need to cut back some of the black plastic wrapping over the OEM wires (not their insulation, I mean the wide black "pipe" on the left of my picture which you can see the green and white wires coming out of, this lets you get at the OEM wires better.

[Image: eyes4.jpg]

IS200 Turbo project now just about complete ! See my thread here and leave your comments.
Now running standalone Syvecs ECU and no stock ECU !

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steviewevie

09-05-2016, 08:51 AM #2

The finished item in place :

[Image: eyes5.jpg]

[Image: eyes6.jpg]

[Image: eyes7.jpg]

[Image: eyes8.jpg]

IS200 Turbo project now just about complete ! See my thread here and leave your comments.
Now running standalone Syvecs ECU and no stock ECU !

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