I did. Pair of junkyard HID bulbs and ballasts. Well bodyshop is a better choice from a wreck that popped the housings but the bulbs lived. Repair is to replace the whole housing (friends are good).
I used an old pair of Cebie lamps. Little dremal, removed the stock bulb spacers and the HIDs were just right to put the kernal of light nearly the same place as the H1 bulbs and holders did. Some Paino wire (spring wire) to make clips to hold the bulbs in. Great. Housing needed a bump in the back to hold the starter module. I used the bottom of some old propane cans. The ballast were mounted to the inner fender.
The Bulbs had 3 parts.
The Bulb and holder
The igniter (sometime built into the bulb holder)
The ballast.
The ballast cranks the 12V DC to 85~90V AC. The sires from the ballast to the igniter can be cut and lengthened. Playing around I did it with 15 feet of wire, it was still happy.
The igniter cannot be lengthened from the bulb, that has fancy 40,000V stuff to light off the arc. So the housing needs to be large enough to house the ignitor and the bulb without changing that wiring. Like I mentioned, sometimes the igniter is built into the bulb holder to make things easier.
So what did all this get me? Well I can claim to have built my own HID off road lights. I did get luckey and found how to mount the bulbs to get an acceptable light pattern. I think that would be much more difficult in most other application. My junkyard housings were perfect for what I did. I don't think I could ever recreate them. I also did this years ago when aftermarket HIDs were extremely rare and insanely expensive. I really didn't have any money invested so I was a little more willing to just play around. If it came out bad, toss all the junk.
These days HIDs are a lot easier to find. I am sure that the eBay H3 conversions will probably drop there bulbs right into a cheap set of off-road light housings. But I expect that you will still have packaging issues with the igniter. I will wager that you will need to add a bubble to the housing like I did. So don't expect to buy part A and part B and have a happy slap together marriage.
Now if you do put it all together I have found the light pattern to be a little less then perfect. But for an offroad light that will be perfectly acceptable. Mine were not perfect, they had a lot of glare. But I found that glare very handy in lighting up something besides that one foot diameter spot of light 3 miles in front of me. I could not use them if ANYONE was in front of me, they were a terror to the eyes even at great distances.
Personally, I would look at the cheap ones and just be done with it. Unless you really want to play. Keep in mind it may not work and it is your money. When done they still won't be anything like the high end ones. Lighting optics is a science that is hard to get right, even for the pros.
