Ford Mustang Parts On A Mercedes-Benz?

Interestingly enough, I forgot to share my spring break adventure or mini project I had planned for my car. I figured spring break was the perfect time to accomplish the mini project as I had the whole week off from school and work. As some of you may or may not know, my year Mercedes did not come with the traditional front fog lights. Fog lights, which only light the ground immediately in front of your car, are mainly for very foggy conditions when you are traveling slowly due to limited visibility. They can also sometimes be used on dark windy roads in the middle of the night. According to ehow.com, fog generally hovers at about 10 to 20 inches from the ground. So, in theory, if we project light out into the pocket that does not contain the fog, you can brighten the road for a distance that will allow you to see farther. Low-mounted lights, or fog lights, are usually installed at your bumper or even lower, and the light they expel is actually cut off at the top, creating a light pattern that projects straight out, then flat and then down, but not higher than bumper level.

Just took the bumper off

But for reasons not known to me at least, the Mercedes I drive has fog lights, but they are not mounted in the bumper of the car. Rather my fog lights are in the same housing as my low beam lights (clever design for Mercedes, eh?). Anyhow, I dislike this design so I did some research on my enthusiast forum (Club202.com), and found out that it was possible to fit some fog lights from a 99-04 Ford Mustang, into the little brake cooling ducts that were unoccupied in my bumper. I could not believe this was possible, so I figured I’d give it a shot. After months of pondering on whether or not I should do this, I finally mustered up enough courage to order the Ford Mustang fog lights on eBay. They arrived the first day of spring break, and I was thrilled to fit them into my bumper. Within an hour of receiving them in the mail, I immediately called a friend from home, to see if he could assist me in the installation of these new fog lights. Sure enough, he was more than willing to help me out with this project (we share very similar passions about our cars).

I drove over to his garage, and within minutes we had jacked up the car, and put it on jack stands to keep the car off the ground so we could easily work on it. In order to install these fog lights, we needed to remove my bumper, and we did so within 20 minutes. After removing the bumper, we started to synthesize ideas on how to mount these fog lights (since these fog lights were not meant for the car it was not a “perfect fit”, some modifications had to be made). After hours and hours of trying to figure out how we could make these fog lights stay in place in the bumper we were completely stumped. We finally figured out that we needed to build a custom bracket in order for these lights to stay in place in the bumper. Next stop was to Home Depot, where we found an “L-shaped” bracket that perfectly matched our measurements and therefore fit into the bumper. After over 6 hours of thinking, we finally figured it out! We drilled a few new holes in the bumper to secure our bracket and fog lights together, and then spent some time lining up the lights so that they were ideal for road use (Believe this will make much more sense once I post some pictures). After about 8 hours, it was a done deal!

In this before picture you can see there are no lights in the little holes (brake cooling ducts) to the left and right of the license plate

Now, this after picture shows the 99-04 Mustang Fog Lights installed in the two little holes (brake cooling ducts)

The finished product right before we took it off  the jack stands

Unfortunately, spring break was winding down, and although the new fog lights were mounted to the bumper, I was unable to schedule an appointment to get these fog lights wired and ready for road use. No worries though, this is the first thing I will be crossing off the list when I get back home for the summer.