BMW 323i 325i 328i 330i Driver & Passenger Side 2 Piece Headlight Set DIY Solutions LHT03624

What's up guys? I'm Andy from 1A Auto. In this video, I'm going to show you how to replace the headlight assembly's on this 2001 BMW 325xi. If you need parts for your vehicle, click the link in the description and head over to 1aauto.com.

Take a straight blade screwdriver, there's a little tab that we need to push down on here. Just take a trim tool, get back here, slide it forward. There we go. Slides right out. What you're pushing down on is this tab right here. So you don't have to push it very far and you don't want to break it, it is plastic. Slide that out, disconnect the connector right here and just push down on the tab, slide it down.

All right, so there's a couple ways we can take this light out. We definitely need to take these two screws out right here. I'm going to use a eight millimeter socket, extension and a ratchet. But you can take... there's a screw right down here, if you have a long extension, take that out. I'm going to put some masking tape on the end of my socket because I want that screw to stick into the socket. Take this one out, push that down. Slide this bolt out, just like that, so that's one. And then take this one out in back here same way. Take that out. I can take that masking tape off now. You could do with electrical tape as well.

I'm going to take these two out. The same eight millimeter socket. Take that bolt out, grab this. Now, this piece is broken over here on this trip piece but if your piece wasn't broken, you'd want to take a small straight blade screwdriver, release the clip on that trim. Slide this forward, disconnect the connectors right here and same with right here. Let's slide it out. All right, so we want to take this trim piece off. Now you can take this trim piece off in the vehicle, it seems a little bit easier to do it the way we just did it. Just take a straight blade screwdriver, go in here. Just slide that out, slide this forward just like that. And there's a little clip right here. Just slide that out, just like that.

Here's the old part, here's the new headlight assembly from 1aauto.com. As you can see, it has the same shape, same lens, same mounting positions up top, same adjusters. Flip it around, the back has a slightly different design but it's still going to work great. Get yours a 1aauto.com and you can do it yourself.

Now the headlight bulbs that come with these new headlights are just test bulbs, so it's a good idea to replace the actual bulbs. You just take this off or you can reuse your old bulbs. Slide this connector out just like that. There's a little tab right here, you just push down on this tab and then same with this side, push down on that tab. This hinges up, you can grab the bulb, slide it out and swap in your old one.

To reinstall the bulb, just line up the tab, just like that. Push on this little retainer. And then on this side, lock it in place. Take the connector, connect the connector just like that. And then reinstall this cover, this keeps the elements out. And it's nice and sealed and you're good to go. You can do the same for the high beam.

So in installing this, it comes with this new lower bracket. The way we took it apart was taking these bolts out and slid it off. So you can either take off this bracket and reuse the old bracket or you could take the old bracket off the car and just slide this on with the new bracket on there.

So if you wanted to take that trim off before instead of taking those two lower bolts out, what you could do is get in here and take these two lower bolts out. This one actually is missing one. Take this off and there's the bracket that goes on the bottom side. So we're going to reinstall it with the new bracket. Before I slide the headlight in, we're going to connect these connectors right here. This is going to go this way. This connector's actually broken but it'll slide that like that, and then this connector here. Lock it in place and we can slide this in position just like that. Make sure those are lined up.

Now I'm going to take the bolt and then take the masking tape, do the same masking tape trick. Just tape up the socket, push the bolts onto the socket and then it'll stay. Just slide up on the headlight a little bit. Now this is the tricky part. This is why I took it apart the other way. It's a little bit more difficult to get this in here. Try to get it to line up. Take the socket, snug it up. And we'll do the same with the other one. Snug that down and we can put these two bolts in up top. Tighten those two down, connect the light bulbs. You can connect the light bulbs now, they might have been a little bit easier to connect them while the headlight was still going in. Now we can take this trim piece and it's going to line up. There's a tab right there, line that tab up, and this tab. And then, over near the fender, line that up and lock it in place.

Take the corner bulb, plug it in. Lock that in place and just slide this in position. There's a couple of grooves, these two tabs need to slid into those grooves, and lock it in. To adjust the headlights, the up and down adjustment is right here. You can either do it by hand with this little gear here, or you can use a Philips head screwdriver, get in there, adjust the headlight. Also, the left to right is adjusted over here through this hole.

This is a basic tutorial on how to aim the headlights on your vehicle. Find the axis of your headlights, this is usually indicated with a small dot or the headlight bulb size on the lens. If not, it's the actual center point of your headlight bulb.

Transfer this mark to a vertical wall with a preferably dark color that'll allow you to back up 25 feet. Pull up and find the center line of your vehicle as well as the center line of your headlight axis. Mark the wall with the hight of the headlights and a straight line going across at that axis height. Back your vehicle up 25 feet from the wall to the front edge of your vehicle's headlights. Turn your headlights on, and locate the adjusting screw, usually on the backside of your headlights. You'll want to rotate this until the passenger hotspot or focus of the beam, is approximately two inches below the line and the drivers side is four inches below the line.

We change the heights on each side so you can still get a good beam to the offside of the road on the passenger side, and have the drivers side low enough to not blind oncoming traffic.

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