E60orBust

First off, this mod is not for the light hearted or first timers. For those two categories, get yourself some Hoen Xenonmatch Plus bulbs for your foggies. Everyone else, here is a detailed guide to install a set of Prolumen HID bulbs inside your stock housings and have them be true projector fog lights instead of that horrid scattered pattern.

Parts (and there's a lot of em)
2 H3 Bulbs, 2 ignitors, 2 ballasts, 2 H3 Adapter Plugs From JleviSW
2 Resistors (50W 60hm) Again from Jlevi
1 Complete Relay/Wiring Harness for HID system from TheXenonStore.com
1 set of Projector foglight housings. These were made for the E46 but can be removed from their mounts and modded. I got mine from Jlevi but via phone ordering.
1 Set of Zip Ties, a handful of weatherproof wire connectors (male and female) and heat shrink tubing

Tools
Dremel with drill bit and grinder wheel, razor, 3/4" Drill Bit, Phillips Screw Driver, 5/16, 10MM, and 13MM sockets, T20, T30 and T45 torx bits, Cordless Drill with drill and screw bits, 4 Metal Self-Tapping Screws, Needle Nose Pliers, Electrical Tape, heat source (lighter, torch, or match if your brave enough.

Precautionary. I once read a store where a guy was working on his car and as he was unscrewing the battery terminal, the socket touched his ring (left-handed bloke) and completed the "circuit" essentially welding the ring to the socket to the battery's positive terminal. Quick thinking left him with second degree burns where the ring was instead of becoming the man with 9 fingers. So in light of this, I disconnected the car's negative battery terminal. After I was done I did get two unexpected i-drive error messages, one related to the window's anti-trap feature malfunctioning and the other was active steering gone wonky. Both have solutions which you can find (as I did) via the search command on this forum.

Onward!
First step is to remove the OEM fog light housings from the bumper. Since I was planning on a few other mods, I took the whole bumper off to get at the fog lights. See my post over here for info on how to get the bumper off. Once you have the projector fogs from Jlevi (Currently sold out ) you'll be doing something similar to my post here

Drill the hole with a 13/64 bit


Once you've marked the opposite side and put a pilot hole in with the dremel, augment it with 13/64 drill bit to match the first hole. Put your bolts in and thread them into the projector housing and it should look like this.As you can see, I was able to retain the original adjustment screw so I can aim these up and down like the original OEM fog lights.


Now you rip out the guts of the original projector backing and drill a 3/4 hole through the center to make room for the H3 bulb



Since you still have your dremel out, modify the H3 wire harness to fit the 9006 prolumen plug



You're done with your workbench. Time to head back outside.
Next, remove your headlights. Again, prior post here
With the bumper off, you can mount the ballasts behind the main beam and the resistors under it.

Resistor pilot hole with 1/8 bit and screwed in with 6 X 1/2 pan phillips screw


Recap: Projectors inside oem housing, relays and ballasts mounted. Time to wire up the relay kit. To access the positive battery terminal, you have to get that strut bar out of the way. My car is a 545i, sport package and active steering/suspension. If your car doesn't have this strut bar, then consider yourself lucky for this mod. As I said in the beginning, I took the negative terminal off the battery in the trunk to be on the safe side. If you don't and frizzle yourself....

Time to remove the driver-side strut bar.


Lift in the red circle and slide towards you.










Now your relay has tapped the positive terminal and the grounding bolt. Extend necessary leads with the wire connectors and heat-shrink tubing and route your wires.






The resistor just taps one wire to positive and the other wire to negative from the original OEM fog light plug. The resistor itself has no polarity so either wire is fine.


Night time pictures to come.


Thats it, Your done. Thanks to Umnitza for the original how-to guide on the E65, Nick at JleviSW for patience and getting the parts to pair up right and sna77 and Alex323ci from E46fanatics.com for giving me the idea to put this all together.

525iSE

I don't understand why you have to go through the complication of a relay. I didn't put a relay in mine, and my plugs fitted perfectly without mods. The only difference that you have is the modded projector fogs. Why did you have to relay? Just plug it right it with some resistors, and it'll work right? I'm just curious but this is a wonderful write up, and nice mod!!

E60orBust

I was just following Umnitza's original write-up on the E65. Both that and my E60 have idrive (and encoutered the same errors). Plus when I was testing the bulbs and plugged them directly into the foglight plug (as you would on an E46 or non-idrive car), the bulbs didn't come on with the foglight switch. This was before I installed the resistors so you may very well be able to just have resistors + HID fogs + projectors. But with the added relay I know they will always have sufficient power.

Oh, and ignore that final picture of the OEM foglight housing. I double loaded the image by accident.

umnitza

You have to use the relay to prevent any unwanted voltage spikes from the LCM as it checks for working bulbs.

525iSE

Any potential or major risk if I don't use a relay? Because right now I don't use a relay for my car, everything works fine, but I don't want to risk anything major. thanks.

Busta

Thanks for the write-up..looking forward to the night images.