Well I guess it's kinda good & sorta bad, at least you can access it w/out dropping the bumper, but does sound like the ballast may be in trouble. Good luck Mike, hope all it needs is to dry out. Seems like bad luck that water got in there in the first place, were all your seals intact?

 

I am so happy right now! A little blow dry action, coupled with a few hours of sitting inside a ziplock full of silicone beads and voila!



All the seals seem intact. The headlight has been free of moisture since i painted it a while back. It just seems all the recent rains has managed to seep moisture in.

Although, i left a seal out open this time around. I remember one headlight was with a loose seal for nearly a year and it never developed moisture. Our headlights are "closed-type" with no venting holes, i think it could benefit from one. Hopefully this experiment is successful, in my favor.

And oh, since Kool promised it, i guess i owe you guys a mini write-up on how to get to the fuse box, what kind of fuses are there, and how to dry a ballast.

 

^lol cant wait for it! glad you got it figured out at the cost of time and without having to spend any $$

 

Awesome that you didn't have to replace the ballast, also great that you can fill us in on what you did

 

i have the same problem, but my ballast is actually dead... so i got my new ballast in to swap... also tested it, and it works.

ONLY problem now i have is, I want to replace it but I can't get to remove the screws from the ballast. (via fender wall) how did you manage to remove those damn screws without removing the bumper? I really don't want to spend money on something that can be easily fixed.

 

Woostar, the driver side ballast is relatively easy to get to, just remove the wheel well cover and you'll be able to get under the car and reach in to those three bolts to remove the ballast.

Once loose, just tilt it sideway and get a small phillips screw to unfasten the HID cable from it, then unclip the cable. Do you have a pic of the ballast? I have two kinds -- both are screwed in, but one slips out after it's unscrewed.

If this is the passenger side, you can still technically remove it from the wheel well/underneath, but it's a whole lot trickier as the washer fluid reservoir is in the way.

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So, here's an update btw. A couple of days after this fix, the ballast went dead again -- there was water in the headlight again from all the rain. I guess 2 weeks of torrential rain was enough to get something to seep in there.

As of this morning, the car is lifted, bumper down, both headlights out -- dismantled, cleaned, re-assembled and butyl taped like nobody's business. I hope to re-install and test that everything is okay later today. *crossing fingers* I really want this ordeal to be done with, and have a problem-free G again!

(FTR, the past couple of weeks have been ... interesting. First this, followed immediately by a weird alignment throw... all four corners went completely whack -- going straight my steering wheel was tilted almost 45 degrees, etc... And when I took a tire off last night, there's a screw on the tire! No pressure lost, but still, it's less than 1k miles young! *sigh*)

 

Damn, that sucks Mike, hopefully the butyl tape will make it tight. Wonder if the ballast will come back to life again, good luck. I hope I never have to open my lights again, the first time was plenty for me

 

Ok so I got my headlights fixed. I didn't have to take off my bumper to access the ballast for the passenger side. I just simply remove the harness of windows washer resovior. It was little tougher than driver side. But over all you just need extended socket 10mm wrench.

I found that the ballast wasn't bad. The wires were bad, so I just replaced both. I've noticed the wires were cut and burnt. So that was the cause.

I had to remove the tire and fender wall. It wasn't tough at all. Just need to have right tools to remove it.

Took me and my buddy about an hour or so. And I've also installed g37s rear sway on my g35x. That was simpler install lol.

 

I hope so, too! If water gets in there, the weak link would have to be elsewhere, and i don't want there to be one regardless.

Happy to say, i've got a cat of a ballast. It's working again! The other upside to this ordeal is it allowed me to clean the inside of the lenses, which got a little cloudy from either moisture of gassing out of the paint. It's all nice and crystal-clear now *knock on wood*. The rain has passed so it won't get tested for a while, but when it comes, i hope it finally stands its ground.

Glad you fixed it! I can't believe you got that passenger-side ballast out. I couldn't even budge the reservoir from just the wheel well. Kudos to you, sir.