how do you know?
how can you check?

http://www.fieros.de/en/articles/headlight.html
remove the relay, disconnect the connector, watch the lock. The input side has three wires, the output side has two wires. Measure the voltage between the red and black wires on the input side, there should be battery voltage at all times, or you have no ground or a blown fusible link. Check if there is 12V between pink and black with the headlight switch in the "on" position. If not, check the wiring between the isolation relay and headlight relay. Disconnect the single connector with the blue wire. The side going to the relay (blue) must carry 12V measured to ground if the headlight switch is in the "off" position.

If everything is ok up to now, the motor should work, if the relay is not shot. So momentarily jumper the grey wire on the relay connector to ground and green to 12V. The motor should turn. Then jumper green to ground and the single wire to 12V. The motor should turn the other direction. If it does, the relay is shot, if not, it's the motor.

I hope this will help you!

[This message has been edited by Miss86GT (edited 03-22-2013).]

You can also swap out the relays for the two headlights. If the problem goes with the relay, it's bad. What are your symptoms? It may not be a relay, or it may be the main isolator relay.

Electrical tests are good. It is also possible to take the housing off without too much effort-then look at windings and points. I think I have done that several times and the relays did not mind-put them back in service.

Is the main relay the one on the drivers side wall of the drivers side headlight bucket? I think mine is shot because I have to half hold down the headlight button to get them to go up. If I flip it to the up position they will stop at whatever point they are at. Changing the button did not help. Once they are up, flipping the switch to the off position will close them without having to half hold the switch down. I have a good extra relay from an old harness that was for the fuel pump, I think all the relays are the same though and I wanted to swap them out to see if anything changes. The relays for each headlight are good though.

ZK, the relay on the left fender wall is an isolation relay. It's not used anywhere else and is no longer available from any manufacturer. Though the harness plugs for the headlight motor relays and maybe some other relays are the same, they won't interchange.

I have no idea, i have a customer whom I'm going to do thier gen one headlights for.

idk the condition on them, but they remain popped up. so I will see when I get them and report back.

If they remain up my guess is they disconnected the wires to the motors. Talking to my engineer friend the other day on this system he showed me how the voltage has to go thru several relay contacts to lift the headlight buckets but only a couple relay contacts to close the headlights. If I spent some more time with this guy we could discuss why they did it this way because in my opinion they should have made the up motion the shorter electrical path as it takes more to lift the lid. Maybe if they did it that way fewer would have problems. Maybe the engineer(s) that designed the headlight system had a reason to do it this way. Maybe it was an oversight?

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Rodney Dickman

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