Headlight motor malfunction
 

My facelift has an intermittent fault with the headlight dipping motor. Works briefly (offside) then stops operating whilst nearside is still working. Any ideas? Examined connector, cleaned pins, seems like motor (or is it a solenoid?) Weak?

The stepper motor is connected to the lower edge of the pivoting reflector. The connection is through a sort of universal joint in a plastic push-rod.

https://www.mediafire.com/convkey/34...pb6d88566g.jpg

The joint has neen known to get stiff enough to prevent the action. The only way to fix it or to examine the motor system is to separate the two halves of the lamp. This involves a bit of cookery in the oven at 100C. There's a HowTo on this somewhere.


Another common issue that can affect this is the headlamp harness getting chafed through where it passes over a weld seam on the body.


https://www.mediafire.com/convkey/c1...go872o156g.jpg



You need the front bumper off to get to this. It's near the screen wash bottle.


TC

To T-Cut.

How about drilling a hole in the housing to squirt some WD 40 on the joint ??? Easy to tape over the hole after .

But drill exactly where?

Through the lens so you can see what you're doing :eek:

Even if this was possible you'd need something a lot more precise than blasting the inside of the headlight with WD40.

If you really prefer to cut into the case to access the works, there is indeed an old thread (somewhere) covering exactly that. A square trapdoor was cut into the case just above the pushrod. This allowed a measure of direct contact with the ball joints, etc. From personal experience though, you'll have to do a lot of clever searching and with a bit of good luck, you might find it. But do please check for the harness chafing mentioned before doing any surgery or cookery on the headlap.



TC

I had this a couple of months ago. First place to check is the loom that plugs into the headlight. Remove the headlight and check the cable for any and all damage. For me, the cable was fine.

For the headlight, the prospect of putting it in the oven, removing the lens and then working around the inner workings seemed a little too scary. Instead, I used a soldering iron with a knife attachment to cut a hole into the black casing, found the problem (caused by the ball-joint coming apart).

I pushed the joint back together, and use the soldering iron to 'weld' the plastic hatch back into place. Not the neatest of job, but far simpler than cooking the headlight!

Few photos here...

https://photos.app.goo.gl/mGjCLbdx2WEWGr8K9

Have a read of post number 7.------;)

Makes sense, at least more sense than cooking the whole thing.---:eek::eek::eek:





Blasting with WD 40.??????? Sounds like 'bull in china shop' tactics.---Lol.

A TINY drop will be all that's needed.

Many thanks for the info! I think you are right about stiff joints. The action I get is it pulls down, albeit sounds slugish compared to near side operation. So after mot will investigate further. Although I notice when you switch on headlights they automatically return to neutral setting '0' probably so you drive away after having on low previously?

The headlamps are supposed to stay at the last manual setting between startups.
The occasional up/down movement you see at startup is simply an automated range verification.


TC