E Mods

So like I said I've been keeping myself busy the last couple weeks by messing around with the car. It gives me an excuse to get outside and gives me a task to occupy my mind and my hands. I'm not mechanically and definitely not electrically inclined, so most of what I get done is by trial and error. Eventually most of it works out pretty well though. Here's some pics of my "journey" through my initial mods on my Element.

So here's what the E front end looks like before.


Then I took the front end off, which really isn't as complicated as it sounds. The whole thing is one big piece of molded plastic, held on my a bunch plastic fasteners that pop out and about 4 screws.


Then you E looks like this.


Here's a pic of the back side of the front end. I installed a screen in front of the radiator so it wouldn't get all dinged up with rocks. I used gutter guard that you can buy from Home Depot for like a buck-fifty a section (totally got this from an online Element Owners Club, such a great idea!). I bought two sections, one for the upper grill, one for the lower. I had to trim it to fit and had some left over which turned out to be a good thing. I wound up using the scrap for a different project (more on that later). I had to cut out around the license plate holder (red arrow) to get the fit I wanted. I opted to put the screen in front of the grill, as opposed to behind, because I liked the rounded look I had seen on some of the other E's I'd seen on the EOC site.

Here are the sheets of gutter guard.


I decided to do put the guard in front on the top grille as well as I am not into the whole honeycomb look. So I basically just held up the sheet to the front of the grill and then eye-balled it, snipped it with some tin-snips and trimmed it to fit. Wound up coming out in tow pieces cuz I screwed up some of the initial eye-balled measurement's, but it's still a pretty good fit. I'm also not really going for the whole "bling" look, so i toned down the shiny silver finish by painting it black. Very low key. Once i got the cut out panels painted black and dried, I used some tiny black zipties that i got at Fred-Meyers to attach the pieces to the grille. They are super slim and not noticeable unless you are right up looking for them.


So, while I had the front end off and I was waiting for the panels to dry, I figured I might as well wire in some lights as well. There are these pre-fabbed places for fog lights in the front panel. You just cut out a couple pieces of plastic and throw the lights in there. Honda has some that are pre-wired and mounted and all you do is screw them in and then plug in the wires, but they cost over 200 bucks.... uh, no. So I bought some $20 dollar specials from GI Joes and wired them in myself. This takes some creativity as there are screw holes in the molded plastic, but the brackets that come with the lights won't work with them. SO, here's a picture of my solution. I used the cut out piece of plastic as a backing plate then used the scrap from the grill guard as a mounting plate to attach to the front end. The screws go through the holes in the gutter guard almost perfectly. I'm not gonna lie, it's hella ugly and the lights are a bit skewed/twisted, but overall, it's not very noticeable since the are round lights. After I got them on, i realized that the shiny silver gutter guard that i had used as mounting was obnoxiously showing through, so i un mounted everything and painted those black as well.


So here's what it looks like from the back side when I finally got it all wired up and done. Please excuse the rainbow variety of colored wires used. Like I said, I'm not electrically inclined and I'm just lucky I got all the wires to the right places without electrocuting myself.


And here's what it looked like when I got it all done.

*Insert about a week here to actually get the lights working. The wiring was a bit screwed up as this was my first time using a relay (which I understand is the proper/safer way to wire lights). The main problem came when trying to find a wire under my dash to use as a power source for the switch. I looked all over for the elusive "red/blue" lowbeam wire, but found not a one that worked. I did however tap into a red/blue wire that I found somewhere under the dash that gives power when the ignition is on and was so fed up by this time that i just used that.*



Soo then I got bored and saw another post on the EOC do-it-yourself site that inspired me, so i also through on some auxiliary driving lights as well. I got courageous and decided to wire these directly ((with another relay... perhaps over kill?) into the highbeams in front so I wouldn't have to hastle with running another switch wire through the sidepanel and under the dash. Here's the end result as of last night.

What do you think?